title: Effective vaccine communication during the disneyland measles outbreak.
abstract: Vaccine refusal rates have increased in recent years, highlighting the need for effective risk communication, especially over social media. Fuzzy-trace theory predicts that individuals encode bottom-line meaning ("gist") and statistical information ("verbatim") in parallel and those articles expressing a clear gist will be most compelling. We coded news articles (n=4581) collected during the 2014-2015 Disneyland measles for content including statistics, stories, or bottom-line gists regarding vaccines and vaccine-preventable illnesses. We measured the extent to which articles were compelling by how frequently they were shared on Facebook. The most widely shared articles expressed bottom-line gists, although articles containing statistics were also more likely to be shared than articles lacking statistics. Stories had limited impact on Facebook shares. Results support Fuzzy Trace Theory's predictions regarding the distinct yet parallel impact of categorical gist and statistical verbatim information on public health communication.
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA. Electronic address: broniatowski@gwu.edu.
authors.forename: David A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Broniatowski
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Promotion & Behavior, College of Public Health, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.
authors.forename: Karen M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Hilyard
authors.affiliation: Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dredze
mesh_terms: D003142:Communication; D004196:Disease Outbreaks; D006801:Humans; D008457:Measles / Q000453:epidemiology*; D011634:Public Health; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D061108:Social Media; D014611:Vaccination / Q000523:psychology; D000072758:Vaccination Refusal
keywords: Facebook; Fuzzy-trace theory; MMR; Measles; Social media; Twitter