ReviewJournal of global health2020
Analysis of public engagement with ten major global health topics on a social network profile and a newspaper website.
Review in Journal of global health, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Evaluating the Effectiveness of Internet-Based Communication for Public Health: Systematic Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Pooled it
- Ideometrics: a scientific approach to generating, evaluating, and prioritising ideas.Journal of global health · 2025Article
- Uneven Implications of Lockdown Amid COVID-19 in India: From Harassment, Stigma, Crime, and Internally Displaced People to Stress and Coping Strategies in the Middle/Upper Class.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Facebook Users' Interactions, Organic Reach, and Engagement in a Smoking Cessation Intervention: Content Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Article
- An Ethnography Study of a Viral YouTube Educational Video in Ecuador: Dealing With Death and Grief in Times of COVID-19.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundEfforts in global health and development have broad political support and substantial financial commitment from most governments. However, this support could be greater if global health issues featured more prominently in the public debate. It has proven quite difficult to make global health issues attractive for viewing and engaging with, as compared to other forms of entertainment or public debates in the media.
methodsWithin the Massive Open Online Course "Survival: The Story of Global Health", we created 10 educational videos on major global health topics. Between August 1 and September 30, 2017, we posted each episode with a brief background text on the Facebook profile of the narrator, who had an average of 450 friends and further 800 followers throughout the period of study. We studied the interaction of Facebook friends and followers with each posted video, tracing the number of their "likes", "shares" and "comments". Moreover, a popular Croatian online newspaper portal with about 250 000 daily viewers shared three of these stories after they were posted on Facebook and views, shares and comments were monitored. We recorded the effect on the number of YouTube views of the featured videos.
resultsThe 10 posts received between 65 and 274 "likes" on the Facebook profile and between 2 and 124 shares, receiving between 0 and 17 comments. The three episodes that were shared by the online newspaper portal were further shared between 164 and 2820 times, receiving between 8 and 111 comments from the general public. The effect of these two promotion channels on YouTube viewership resulted in between 107 and 9784 views of the 10 featured videos, with the number of "likes" received on YouTube ranging between 0 and 43. The video that raised the most attention and shares was the one on the history of pandemics, which also had the highest number of shares on YouTube (n=69), followed by the video on human evolution (n = 14). Topics of non-communicable diseases, ageing and dying, and the future of humanity were also popular, while the topics more specific to global health raised less interest - ie, maternal and child mortality, major infectious diseases, international organizations, inequality and equity, and the UN Millennium Development Goals.
conclusionOur study showed that the interest in "core" global health topics was, as a rule, lower than in the topics which have a more general appeal - such as pandemic threat, human origins, ageing and dying. If we aim to increase public interest in global health topics, a feasible strategy would be to adjust the language and presentation used to be of more appeal to popular culture. Linking promotional materials to other popular topics that are dominating the public debate or capturing their interest could prove to be a successful strategy to achieve this.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.