Milkman, K., Patel, M., Gandhi, L., Graci, H., Gromet, D., Ho, H., Kay, J., et al. (2021).
A megastudy of text-based nudges encouraging patients to get vaccinated at an upcoming doctor's appointment.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ,
118 (20).
Publisher's VersionAbstractMany Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment (N = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findings suggest that text messages sent prior to a primary care visit can boost vaccination rates by an average of 5%. Overall, interventions performed better when they were 1) framed as reminders to get flu shots that were already reserved for the patient and 2) congruent with the sort of communications patients expected to receive from their healthcare provider (i.e., not surprising, casual, or interactive). The best-performing intervention in our study reminded patients twice to get their flu shot at their upcoming doctor’s appointment and indicated it was reserved for them. This successful script could be used as a template for campaigns to encourage the adoption of life-saving vaccines, including against COVID-19.
Robinson, C., Chande, R., Burgess, S., & Rogers, T. (2021).
Parent Engagement Interventions Are Not Costless: Opportunity Cost and Crowd Out of Parental Investment.
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
AbstractMany educational interventions encourage parents to engage in their child’s education as if parental time and attention is limitless. Sadly, though, it is not. Successfully encouraging certain parental investments may crowd out other productive behaviors. A randomized field experiment (N = 2,212) assessed the impact of an intervention in which parents of middle and high school students received multiple text messages per week encouraging them to ask their children specific questions tied to their science curriculum. The intervention increased parent–child at-home conversations about science but did not detectably impact science test scores. However, the intervention decreased parent engagement in other, potentially productive, parent behaviors. These findings illustrate that parent engagement interventions are not costless: There are opportunity costs to shifting parental effort.
robinson_chande_burgess_rogers.2021.pdf