From Pandemic Hobby to Public Health Insight
Designing a course for her 2021 Cottrell Scholar proposal led to a pandemic hobby for Leah Witus, Chemistry, Macalester College. That hobby, making animated science videos for her kids, has resulted in an unexpected research project that may offer timely and useful insights into public health messaging around COVID-vaccine hesitancy.
“My foray into science communication is quite a side project from my main research area, but it was inspired by the application for the Cottrell Scholar Award, which encourages you to consider an unmet need at your institution as part of your educational plan,” Witus said. “Communicating as a scientist wasn’t a class I was previously planning on teaching, and it wasn’t something that I have long had an interest in, but the Cottrell application pushed me to consider how such a course would benefit students at Macalester.”
“It became an interest,” she said. “Communication is such a crucial part of careers, no matter what path you follow,” she said.
She began developing the course to cover the conventions, challenges, and opportunities of both communication within the profession and with the broader public, including how to do science demonstrations for kids, how to counter misconceptions about science, and analyzing examples of how scientists communicate on social media platforms.
By September 2020, Witus was recording video lectures for her Biochem I class, to be taught in a hybrid format. To make the recordings visually interesting, she learned how to use an online animation software called Vyond, and she noticed it had a lot of fun features she hadn’t used for her classes.
“That’s where my professional and personal lives merged and I started making animated science videos for my kids,” she said. “They were ages 1 and 3, home from daycare a ton due to coronavirus exposure, and it was really hard. During their naptime it became my pandemic hobby – using some of these fun software tools to make some science videos for my kids.”
She called the series Preschool PhD and posted them online.
“I knew my kids would like them, and it was a creative outlet for me,” she said. “My kids loved watching the videos and helping me make them.”
After the first COVID-19 vaccines were approved in December 2020, inspired by the public science communication she had seen while writing her Cottrell educational proposal, she decided to make a video for adults to explain how mRNA vaccines work. Conducting public health research was not on her mind at the time, but she wondered if something as simple as watching an eight-minute video on YouTube could help people feel more comfortable getting vaccinated.
“I really just made the video for fun over winter break, but I started getting feedback that the video was having an impact on people who had seen it,” she said. “It helped them to understand the core concept of the new vaccines – that it’s your body’s own immune system at work.”
She mentioned the video to a Macalester colleague, sociology professor Erik Larson, who suggested they collaborate to conduct a randomized controlled trial to test empirically the effectiveness of the video.
“I just wanted to know if the video was effective,” Witus said, “but he suggested we add another element and look at gender and political persuasion.”
With about 1,200 participants in the study, they compared two nearly identical versions of the video: one with a female narrator (Witus’ voice) and one with a male narrator (voiced by her husband and Cottrell Scholar 2019 Dennis Cao, also a professor of chemistry at Macalester). Neither video shows the narrator. Some participants read a transcript of the video, and a control group received no health information at all.
The results were surprising.
They found that the male-narrated video increased vaccination intent compared to those who did not see the video. The female-narrated video had varied influence, with evidence of decreased vaccination intent among politically conservative participants who watched it. The study’s results have not yet been peer-reviewed but are available as a preprint on medRxiv. (The study has also received mention in a New York Times article on vaccine hesitancy.)
“I was definitely surprised by the results, but when you think about everything that’s known about gender bias, I guess it’s not surprising,” Witus said. “It is disappointing that the messenger can matter so much, but the way I think about it in the short term is this: Overcoming vaccine hesitancy is crucial for our society to end the pandemic and get back to normal, so anything we can do to help convince someone to get vaccinated, I’m all for it.”
Witus said the study reiterates the challenge in changing public perception about who is the voice of science.
“We need to continue working to overcome gender bias in science – particularly because women played such crucial roles in the development of the COVID-19 vaccines,” she said.
Her study adds an ethical question to the science communication course she is preparing to teach in the fall of 2021. If using the male-narrated version is more effective in increasing vaccination intention, would doing so perpetuate stereotypes? Should we be promoting the female version, even though it’s not as effective? Do public health considerations overcome those concerns?
“I don’t have all the answers, but that will be really great to discuss with students,” Witus said. “It will be an interesting way to bring students into my own journey.”
