ArticleGlobal health, science and practice2021
New Mixed Methods Approach for Monitoring Community Perceptions of Ebola and Response Efforts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Article in Global health, science and practice, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- Access to licenced vaccines for high-threat infectious diseases: a scoping review and interpretive analysis of Ebola virus disease.BMC infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Article
- Progressive Development of a New Tool for Rapid Thematic Analysis of Community Perceptions and Concerns During Health Emergencies.Global health, science and practice · 2025Article
- Using the Community Perception Tracker (CPT) to inform COVID-19 response in Lebanon and Zimbabwe: a qualitative methods evaluation.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Violence against health care workers in a crisis context: a mixed cross-sectional study in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.Conflict and health · 2023Article
- COVID-19 Vaccine Perceptions among Ebola-Affected Communities in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2021.Vaccines · 2023Article
- Ebola vaccine uptake and attitudes among healthcare workers in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2021.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- The response is like a big ship': community feedback as a case study of evidence uptake and use in the 2018-2020 Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.BMJ global health · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundEfforts to contain the spread of Ebola in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) during the 2018-2020 epidemic faced challenges in gaining community trust and participation. This affected implementation of community alerts, early isolation, contact tracing, vaccination, and safe and dignified burials. To quickly understand community perspectives and improve community engagement, collaborators from the DRC Red Cross, the International Federation of the Red Cross, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explored a new method of collecting, coding, and quickly analyzing community feedback.
methodsOver 800 DRC Red Cross local volunteers recorded unstructured, free-text questions and comments from community members during community Ebola awareness activities. Comments were coded and analyzed using a text-coding system developed by the collaborators. Coded comments were then aggregated and qualitatively grouped into major themes, and time trends were examined.
resultsCommunities reported a lack of information about the outbreak and the response, as well as concerns about the Ebola vaccination program and health care quality. Some doubted that Ebola was real. The response used the feedback to revise some community engagement approaches. For example, 2 procedural changes that were followed by drops in negative community responses were: using transparent body bags, which allayed fears that bodies or organs were being stolen, and widening the eligibility criteria for Ebola vaccination, which addressed concerns that selectively vaccinating individuals within Ebola-affected communities was unfair. DISCUSSION: This system is unique in that unstructured feedback collected by local volunteers in the course of their work was rapidly coded, analyzed, and given to health authorities for use in making course corrections throughout the response. It provides a platform for local voices to be heard throughout an emergency response and provides a mechanism for assessing the effects of program adjustments on community sentiments.
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