Generation Vax: Leveraging intergenerational relations to increase uptake of vaccination

PROGRAMME

Generation Vax: Leveraging intergenerational relations to increase uptake of vaccination

About

As our population ages, there is a growing need to prevent ill-health and reduce health-inequalities, including by tackling persistently low routine-vaccination rates among older people living in socioeconomically deprived areas.

Social media, through its global reach, offers the potential to help address this by influencing the perceptions of a significant and growing user-base on immunisation. However, although older people are increasingly using social media, they are still less likely to do so than younger people.

Younger people can significantly influence the behaviour of older family members, including – according to a small, but growing evidence base – their health behaviours. There may therefore be an opportunity to use social media to encourage older people to get vaccinated through their younger family members.

Through this project, we spoke to older people living in deprived areas and older people from Black communities to understand the reasons why some choose not to take up routine vaccinations, such as flu and pneumococcal. We then will created and tested social media content to explore whether:

  • Engaging younger people on social media increases the uptake of flu and pneumococcal vaccinations 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.

This project has been supported by a grant from the Vaccine Confidence Fund.

 

Our campaign

In order to test whether social media adverts can be used to engage different generations with vaccination, we created a number of social media adverts in different formats (a single image advert, GIF and video) that featured real conversations with Open Age members and their families.

These targeted younger and older audiences living in deprived communities separately, encouraging them to learn more about the flu and pneumococcal vaccines and to share the campaign; they also offered eligible people the opportunity to book an appointment.

We ran this campaign on Facebook and Instagram (the most popular platforms among our target groups), from December 2021 to January 2022.

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Reports

Generation Vax – Leveraging intergenerational relations to increase vaccination uptake

The report below outlines the key findings of our Generation Vax research project, which tested whether social media can be used to increase vaccination uptake through a targetted social media advertising campaign.

READ REPORT

Events

Report launch: Generation Vax – Leveraging intergenerational relations to increase vaccination uptake

Join us for the virtual launch of our final report for this project, where we will be sharing new findings on the potential of using social media to engage different generations in promoting public health.

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Blogs

Did the Smoking Kid make any difference?

Anyone who has attended a global public health conference over the past decade is likely to have heard about the Thai Smoking Kid. But did it actually impact on smoking rates? It’s fair to say, I’m pretty cynical about the impact of many public health campaigns. In terms of physical activity, investing in infrastructure and active travel works. But I’m not convinced a few videos, posters or leaflets do.

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News

Social media can help improve vaccination rates, new research finds

New research from the International Longevity Centre-UK (ILC) finds that social media advertising can be a cost-effective way of engaging older people in deprived communities with vaccination.

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The Alliance for Advancing Health Online Invests $7M+ through the Vaccine Confidence Fund to Boost Vaccination Confidence through Social Media

The Alliance for Advancing Health Online Invests $7M+ through the Vaccine Confidence Fund to Boost Vaccination Confidence through Social Media

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Can younger generations encourage older people to get vaccinated?

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

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Get in touch

If you want to get involved or simply find out more about this project, please contact: events@ilcuk.org.uk

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