Overview

Increasing vaccine demand has received far less attention and funding than increasing vaccine supply, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. The Mercury Project research consortium supports the development and testing of interventions to build vaccination demand and healthier information environments. Seeded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled support for applied research projects sited in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, the project received additional funding for applied research on building information environments to support vaccination uptake among undervaccinated populations in the United States from the Robert Wood Johnson, Craig Newmark, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations.

The Mercury Project supports the “social and behavioral science R&D” (Kremer et al 2021) necessary to develop effective interventions to increase vaccination demand. Teams funded under the Mercury Project will rigorously design and test interventions with the potential to be cost-effective at scale in increasing demand for vaccination, other vaccinations, and additional preventative health technologies, and in building healthier information environments.

The NSF-Mercury Project Partnership

The Mercury Project is proud to join with the National Science Foundation in a path-breaking $20M partnership to support social and behavioral science R&D designed to identify interventions with the potential to increase vaccination demand and other health behaviors grounded in science-based public health guidance. This innovative partnership will support research teams seeking to evaluate online or offline interventions to increase vaccination demand and other positive health behaviors, including by targeting the producers and/or consumers of inaccurate health information and/or by increasing confidence in reliable health information. We welcome proposals for evaluations sited in the United States, Africa, Asia, and/or Latin America and the Caribbean.

Application Instructions

To apply for funding through the NSF-Mercury Project partnership, investigators may apply to any of the NSF programs listed below. Proposals should adhere to NSF program deadlines and submission requirements, including the proposal preparation guidelines contained in the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG).

To designate a proposal as being eligible for consideration for Mercury Project co-funding, proposals must include “NSF-SSRC:” at the beginning of the proposal title. 

Participating NSF programs include:

Questions about the NSF-Mercury Project partnership may be directed to mercury@ssrc.org.

Grantees

Addressing my concerns: Increasing vaccine uptake through tailored interactive decision aids

Summary

Hesitancy to take safe vaccines is a long-standing problem that predates Covid-19 and the outbreaks of measles surging in recent years. Some of the most effective interventions for vaccine hesitancy involve counseling sessions with trusted physicians who can address individual concerns. Unfortunately, such approaches are time consuming, costly, and depend on citizens having ready access to trusted primary care physicians. To overcome these barriers, this research team will iteratively develop and test an online, individually-tailored, and interactive video-based decision aid, designed to help people make decisions about vaccines by helping them become informed by a better understanding of their risks and benefits, how vaccines work, and how vaccines are developed.  Using a data efficient, incremental approach to randomized trials, the team will follow-up with participants to test whether engaging with these decision aids increases their uptake of both Covid-19 and influenza vaccines. If impactful, the team will make the final interactive decision aid freely available in both English and Spanish.

Researchers

Rick Lewis (University of Michigan, United States), John Jonides (University of Michigan, United States); Priti Shah (University of Michigan, United States); Ayşecan Boduroğlu (Koç Üniversitesi, Turkey); Madison Fansher (University of Michigan, United States)

Award Year
2023
Project region(s)
North America
Intervention communications channel(s)
Social Media
Research Framework
Intervention Designs
  • Reduce information search costs
  • Reduce decision costs about vaccination
  • Raise non-health benefits of being vaccinated
Study Outcomes
  • Knowledge about vaccines/vaccine-preventable diseases
  • Confidence in vaccines
  • Knowledge of others' vaccine choices
  • Vaccination intentions
  • Vaccination behavior

Intention2Action: An intention-action framework for improving the impact of public health initiatives

Summary

Addressing critical public health challenges, including infectious disease outbreaks and chronic conditions, is essential for societal well-being. Yet, the uptake of vital healthcare resources like vaccines and screenings often falls short. Developing evidence-based interventions to promote positive health behaviors is imperative. To guide effective public health efforts, it is crucial to understand why behavioral interventions succeed in some contexts but not in others, and to examine when deploying a given intervention will be most successful in the field. Our interdisciplinary project combines insights from psychology and behavioral economics, to understand when and among whom behavioral interventions can effectively change individuals’ health behaviors in natural settings as well as how to optimally combine different types of interventions. Leveraging large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs), lab experiments, archival data, and machine learning, we will examine a wide range of consequential health behaviors (Covid-19 and flu vaccinations, cancer screening uptake, chronic condition management). The resulting knowledge will help develop nuanced theories of health decision making and advance the scientific frontier of building demand for vaccines and preventive screenings while also helping explain why promising scientific findings fail to replicate in certain settings. Ultimately, this research has the potential to enhance the impact and reach of public health initiatives by offering actionable insights for customizing interventions to specific sub-populations and temporal contexts.

Researchers

Silvia Saccardo (Carnegie Mellon University, United States), Hengchen Dai (UC Los Angeles (UCLA), United States), Jose Arellano Martorellet (Carnegie Mellon University, United States), Ilana Brody (UC Los Angeles (UCLA), United States), Andrea Low (UC Los Angeles (UCLA), United States)

Award Year
2023
Project region(s)
North America
Intervention communications channel(s)
SMS
Research Framework
Intervention Designs
  • Reduce information search costs
  • Reduce decision costs about vaccination
  • Reduce logistical costs of vaccination
Study Outcomes
  • Knowledge about vaccines/vaccine-preventable diseases
  • Confidence in vaccines
  • Vaccination intentions
  • Vaccination behavior

Messenger matters: medical mistrust, social learning, and vaccine decision-making in rural Namibia

Summary

Healthcare decisions, including decisions to vaccinate, are an amalgamation of complex cultural, social, and psychological interactions, including perceptions of risk, trust in healthcare, locally relevant norms of behavior, and social learning. Understanding both the proximate as well as ultimate-level drivers of vaccine decision-making is crucial to alleviating the burden of disease, and increasing vaccine uptake. In contrast with the large existing body of work on healthcare decision-making from industrialized countries, our study will take place in a set of rural, underserved communities in northwest Namibia, in a region undergoing rapid market integration. This will allow us to determine how shifts in cultural norms, perceptions of disease, and interactions with national healthcare systems affect the ways people learn about disease and their likelihood of using preventative care measures like vaccines. This region is well-suited for this project because the population consists of multiple ethnic groups with variable levels of market integration, different experiences with colonial powers and systemic discrimination, and varying experience with the healthcare system, all of which we predict will influence future healthcare decisions. Specifically, in collaboration with the University of Namibia, we will examine how local models of illness shape vaccination practice, how individual-level factors—including medical mistrust—shape perceptions and use of the healthcare system, how sociodemographic factors shape vaccine beliefs, and how social learning influences individual vaccination decisions.

Researchers

Researchers: Sean Prall (UC Los Angeles (UCLA), United States), Brooke Scelza (UC Los Angeles (UCLA), United States), Helen Davis (Arizona State University, United States)

Award Year
2023
Project region(s)
Africa
Intervention communications channel(s)
Face-to-Face
Research Framework
Intervention Designs
  • Reduce information search costs
  • Reduce decision costs about vaccination
  • Raise non-health benefits of being vaccinated
Study Outcomes
  • Knowledge about vaccines/vaccine-preventable diseases
  • Confidence in vaccines
  • Knowledge of others' vaccine choices
  • Vaccination intentions
  • Vaccination behavior
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