The Advancing Research in Immunization Services (ARISe) Center for Rural Vaccination at UMass Chan Is Live!

The Prevention Research Center at UMass Chan is excited to announce that we have been awarded funding by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to establish the Advancing Research in Immunization Services (ARISe) Center for Rural Vaccination at UMass Chan as a Collaborating Center of CDC’s ARISe Network. Under the leadership of Grace W. Ryan, PhD, MPH, our Collaborating Center seeks to promote vaccination across the lifespan in rural geographies while supporting the overarching goals of the ARISe Network to advance immunization services research The Center will be supported by Dr. Elise Stevens (Co-Investigator) and a partnership with the New England Rural Health Association (NERHA). NERHA will serve as the primary outreach and engagement partner for the Center and facilitate research activities and dissemination.

Our ARISe Collaborating Center seeks to improve vaccination rates in rural New England communities through innovative, community-engaged research. Like much of the country, vaccine uptake in rural New England communities is lower than that in urban population centers. While this inequity is well-documented, less is known about drivers of vaccine hesitancy in these communities and how to develop and implement effective evidence-based approaches for vaccine promotion. Our Collaborating Center will address this gap in two specific ways. First, we will conduct a psychophysiological assessment of rural populations’ reaction to vaccine promotion messaging on social media. Using remote eye-tracking, we will explore which features of social media messages may be most effective for vaccine promotion among rural populations. Building on this, we will use these findings to adapt and test the PRC at UMass Chan’s previously developed community-led vaccine ambassador model to promote vaccination in rural areas with a focus on trusted messengers and message dissemination through social media channels.