ArticleSocial science & medicine (1982)2023
Futile or fertile? The effect of persuasive strategies on citizen engagement in COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets across six national health departments.
Article in Social science & medicine (1982), 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Compliance with social norms in the face of risks: Delineating the roles of uncertainty about risk perceptions versus risk perceptions.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2025Article
- Article
- Improving the communication of uncertainty in food safety on social media: a content analysis of aspartame risk messages.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Useful or not? The discussion of traditional Chinese medicine to treat COVID-19 on a Chinese social networking site.BMJ global health · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
National health departments across the globe have utilized persuasive strategies to promote COVID-19 vaccines through Twitter. However, the effectiveness of those strategies is unclear. This study thereby examined how national health departments deployed persuasive strategies to promote citizen engagement in COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets in six countries, including the UK, the US, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and India. Guided by the heuristic-systematic model and the health belief model, we found that national health departments differed significantly in the use of systematic-heuristic cues and health belief constructs in COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets. Generally, the provision of scientific information and appeals to anecdotes and fear positively, while appeals to bandwagon negatively, predicted citizen engagement. Messages about overcoming barriers and promoting vaccine benefits and self-efficacy positively affected engagement. Emphases of COVID-19 threats and cues to vaccinate demonstrated negative impacts. Importantly, health departments across countries often used futile or detrimental strategies in tweets. A locally adapted evidence-based approach for COVID-19 vaccination persuasion was discussed.
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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.