The MESA Group published a research report titled "Modeling Vaccine Confidence Interventions for Marginalized Migrant Communities: A Mixed-Method Approach to Leveraging Social Media Narratives."

Because of the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 among marginalized migrant populations and the lack of research on vaccine confidence among these populations, this project sought to trace organic discussions of vaccine confidence within Hispanic communities and to use these discussions to develop empirically validated messaging to bolster vaccine confidence and uptake. In doing so, the study had two aims:  First, give voice to Hispanic communities’ discussion of COVID-19 vaccination by conducting in-depth interviews capturing their personal stories, attitudes, and beliefs about COVID-19; targeted qualitative analysis of Hispanic communities’ expression of COVID-19 confidence within Hispanic Facebook groups; and broader exploration of Hispanic communities’ discourse about COVID-19 through machine learning analysis on Facebook. Second, we then used the organically emergent narrative themes to craft messages promoting vaccine confidence and experimentally validated them through an online survey. Taken together, our project’s novel methodology and empirical findings demonstrate the effectiveness of identifying culturally situated discourses as a means to amplify organic community narratives to boost vaccine confidence.