How do you answer a question about the efficacy or safety of vaccines? If you’ve been following the ARTT project, you know that a main focus of our work has been to share a variety of research-backed communication methods you can use to respond to questions like these: sharing a story, for example, providing an alternative explanation, or using empathy. (More about our model and other communication methods can be found here.)
But if you have spent any time with vaccine-related questions, you might have discovered that part of the issue with responding is that the content of the answer itself can be quite complicated. For one, vaccines are at the intersection of some pretty specialized areas of scientific study, such as microbiology, systems biology, and immunology. Most people don’t have a ready understanding of these subjects. For another, sometimes the questions about vaccines aren’t well-formed: they may already have assumptions baked in that make it hard to answer the question (“The shot was rushed, right?”), or point to a deeper issue than the question that is actually being asked (“If vaccines work so well, how come people are still getting sick?”).
Not everyone, in other words, has the depth of knowledge to be able to engage in some of these exchanges around vaccines. While, for many, the best recommendation is that people talk directly to their healthcare provider, we also know that people continue to have these discussions online. For these discussions, we’ve developed some resources for support: our “Discourse Maps” around Vaccines and Scientific Knowledge. The content of these maps illustrate the reasoning and evidence underlying two main claims:
Explore each claim, and you’ll find a series of supporting statements that are backed up with evidence, analogies, examples and fun facts.
Shared as a whole, these maps might overwhelm people. We envision responders focusing on its smaller points and sections to bolster their messages, while using the entire map to understand how its ideas fit together.
Conveniently, you can also share direct links to each of the maps’ elements. This makes it easy to point information seekers towards the specific answer and evidence, and simultaneously towards the larger context.
We’re piloting how helpful the map is as we respond to questions on Reddit, and look forward to learning more.
This is really just the beginning of this work. There’s a lot of different sources and examples that we could learn from and add. Our hope is not to recreate the wheel, but to bring attention to all the great work that is out there, and make it accessible for anyone to learn about and use in their conversations, online and offline. (Thanks very much to Charlotte Moser of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Robert Jennings at the National Public Health Information Coalition for some early thoughts and advice).
If people find it helpful, we want to keep on building this structured repository of evidence and resources; we’d also like to branch into different topics as well. If you have any suggestions for us, let us know at maps [at] discourselabs [dot] org.
