Using survey experiment pre-testing to support future pandemic response

Tappin, Ben ORCID: 0000-0002-3826-8016 and Hewitt, Luke (2024) Using survey experiment pre-testing to support future pandemic response. PNAS Nexus, 3 (11). ISSN 2752-6542

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Abstract

The world could witness another pandemic on the scale of COVID-19 in the future, prompting calls for research into how social and behavioral science can better contribute to pandemic response, especially regarding public engagement and communication. Here, we conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis of a familiar tool from social and behavioral science that could potentially increase the impact of public communication: survey experiments. Specifically, we analyze whether a public health campaign that pays for a survey experiment to pretest and choose between different messages for its public outreach has greater impact in expectation than an otherwise-identical campaign that does not. The main results of our analysis are 3-fold. First, we show that the benefit of such pretesting depends heavily on the values of several key parameters. Second, via simulations and an evidence review, we find that a campaign that allocates some of its budget to pretesting could plausibly increase its expected impact; that is, we estimate that pretesting is cost-effective. Third, we find pretesting has potentially powerful returns to scale; for well-resourced campaigns, we estimate pretesting is robustly cost-effective, a finding that emphasizes the benefit of public health campaigns sharing resources and findings. Our results suggest survey experiment pretesting could cost-effectively increase the impact of public health campaigns in a pandemic, have implications for practice, and establish a research agenda to advance knowledge in this space.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Psychological and Behavioural Science
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Date Deposited:	25 Oct 2024 14:27
Last Modified:	11 Nov 2024 10:54
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/125893

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