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Improving Health Equity for COVID-19 Vaccination for At-risk Populations Using Online Social Networks

NCT04779827 · Status: ACTIVE_NOT_RECRUITING · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 4476

Last updated 2026-03-19

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Social technologies for health have already become essential means for providing underserved populations greater social connectedness and increased access to novel health information. However, these technologies have also had negative unintended consequences. The resulting digital divide in social technology takes many forms - from explicit racism that excludes African American and Latinx populations from the resources enjoyed by White and Asian members of online communities, to self-segregation for the purposes of identity preservation and community-building that unintentionally results in limited informational diversity in underserved communities. The result is an often unnoticed, but highly consequential compounding of inequities.

This research seeks to use an online social network approach to address these challenges, in which the investigators demonstrate how reducing the online levels of network centralization and network homophily among African American community members directly increases their productive engagement with health-promoting information.

Conditions

  • Vaccination Refusal
  • Covid19
  • Heart Diseases

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Online Social Network and Collective Intelligence Intervention

The online network intervention aims to use different configurations of online social networks to optimize the impacts of collective intelligence process to improve individuals' understanding, beliefs, and behavioral choices regarding a variety of health behaviors. Participants will be put into different online networks and respond to health questions while receiving feedback from their network members.

BEHAVIORAL

Independent Control

Independent control aims to test the baseline of population understanding of health behaviors and choices. Participants will respond to health questions independently without getting any feedback from others.

Sponsors & Collaborators

Principal Investigators

  • Damon Centola, PhD · University of Pennsylvania

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE
Masking
NONE
Model
FACTORIAL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2021-05-04
Primary Completion
2023-03-30
Completion
2027-03-30

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

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Entities

Companies

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT04779827 on ClinicalTrials.gov