New research programme seeks to explore whether younger people can influence older people’s engagement with vaccination through social media.

The International Longevity Centre-UK (ILC), supported by a grant from the Vaccine Confidence Fund, have launched a new programme of work: Generation Vax: Leveraging intergenerational relations to increase uptake of immunisation this week.

The programme will first speak to older people living in deprived areas, including those from Black-African and Black-Caribbean communities, to understand the reasons why uptake for routine vaccinations, such as flu and pneumococcal, has typically been lower among these groups than the national average.

In the next stage of this programme, ILC will create and test social media content to explore whether:

• Engaging younger people on social media increases uptake of the flu and pneumococcal vaccines among older people living in deprived areas who aren’t on social media – by speaking to their older family members offline.
• Using younger people to reach older people on social media is more effective than targeting older people directly.
• Whether these results differ among marginalised groups within these deprived areas where uptake is especially low, such as people from Black-African and Black-Caribbean communities.

Sophia Dimitriadis, Research Fellow at ILC, said:

“Younger and older generations are frequently pitted against one another, whether that be in competition for jobs, housing or when laying blame for the climate crisis.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. This innovative project will seek to do the bring generations together to address the health inequalities that have long been entrenched in our society.

We know social media has the ability to influence perceptions and encourage behaviour – in both the best and worst sense.

What we’ll be focussing on is whether it can be used to get public health messaging to older people in marginalised communities through their younger connections.”

Notes

Find out more about: Generation Vax: Leveraging intergenerational relations to increase uptake of immunisation here.

As part of this study, ILC will conduct four focus groups and survey older people living in deprived areas, including those from Black-African and Black-Caribbean communities, to understand:

• Their perceptions of routine vaccinations
• How they use social media
• How younger people can influence their health behaviours, and how they can be supported to do so

ILC will then use this information to design a number of creative campaigns that will be shared on social media. Half of these materials will be shown to younger adults and the other half will be shown to older adults. Finally, ILC will survey users to understand which approach achieved greater impact in terms of increasing vaccination uptake.

This project has been supported by a grant from the Vaccine Confidence Fund. The Fund is financially supported by Facebook and Merck & Co.