Knowledge Gaps, Cognition and Media Learning: Designing Tailored Messages to Address COVID-19 Communication Inequalities

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Abstract

Various health and crisis studies have demonstrated support for the existence of knowledge gaps—a hypothesis suggesting that information will reach those in the lower socioeconomic status last, worsening health disparities. At the point at which COVID-19 vaccines were becoming widely accessible, the present study surveyed 651 Black Americans to understand vaccine hesitancy, intentions, and media learning variations after exposure to different types of social media posts about the COVID-19 vaccine. Although exposure to any of the message conditions in our study resulted in a decrease in vaccine hesitancy, we found mixed support for the knowledge gap hypothesis. Results show that lack of knowledge because of socioeconomic status is not a key factor driving vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans. Instead, public communication (government) campaigns may consider focusing on strategies to target Black American communities by age to improve media learning, and consider increasing social control and communal message functions to increase cognitive processing of pro-vaccine messages, and over the longer term, influence COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and uptake.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics Approval

Approval was granted by the University of Georgia (04/08/2021; PROJECT00003725).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2023.2208049.

Notes

¹ The US Census Bureau categories were used to group age groups https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by internal funding from the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia.