By Ben Hall
noteworthy
From religious beliefs and fear of government overreach to conspiracy theories involving 5G networks and microchips in the serum, the reasons for vaccine hesitancy range from the sincere to the plausible to the risible. What’s interesting is that those reasons—and who does or doesn’t want to get their jabs—can vary widely from country to country.
That’s what a graduate marketing class learned during the spring 2021 semester. As part of its second big project with Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School, the international aid agency CARE asked students working with Professor Pelin Bicen to research vaccine hesitancy around the world. The goal? To help the agency better understand and address this reluctance in regions where it planned to expand its outreach.
Using online surveys in the various native languages, the class collected data from 1,100 people representing different segments of the global population, including Bangladesh, Greece, Guatemala, India, Panama, Russia, Thailand, and Turkey, as well as different groups within the United States, including Latinos, Lebanese, Congolese/DR Congo, and African Americans.
For Jonathan Berakah, BS ’19, MSM ’21, the project was as much a history lesson about his parents’ native Democratic Republic of Congo as it was marketing research.
“I didn’t think there would be anything that would surprise me,” he says. “But the more I researched, the angrier I became. The things going on there were inhuman.” During the colonial era, for example, the government of Belgium’s King Leopold II would amputate the hands of Congolese children if their parents didn’t meet their rubber harvesting quotas—atrocities that created a deep-seated mistrust of government. “The more research I did, the more invested I became,” he says.
Using skills he learned in his graduate marketing classes, Berakah discovered that of all the groups the class researched, native Congolese and people of Congolese descent expressed the greatest level of vaccine hesitancy. And within that group, the most hesitant to embrace vaccines were conservative younger Congolese females with higher levels of education.
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“The research the students provided helped us craft messages we believed might overcome barriers to vaccination and influence vaccine uptake.”
– Jessica Kirkwood, associate vice president at CARE
Students in Professor Pelin Bicen’s graduate marketing class surveyed residents of different global regions. Photograph by Getty Image, Michael J. Clarke
That’s the complete opposite of what Shanelle Schepp learned. Schepp, MSM ’21, grew up in Colombia. Her parents now live in Panama, so she decided to gather data there. Her conclusion? In Panama, it’s men who are more hesitant.
“There was a stark difference between women’s acceptance versus men’s,” Schepp says. “I was surprised at the open-mindedness of Panamanian women to be less hesitant and more accepting.”
Schepp says she enjoyed using her marketing skills on behalf of an “untraditional” client.
“Being able to work with a real-world organization was a great experience,” Schepp says. “It was very satisfying to know that this work will help CARE help people they couldn’t have otherwise because they didn’t have enough visibility into the different countries’ attitudes and behaviors.”
Both Berakah and Schepp turned this capstone experience into full-time jobs after graduation. Schepp now works at Kantar Consulting, where she uses marketing research to help companies understand what a COVID world will look like in five or 10 years. Berakah does market research for the data and market measurement firm Nielsen.
As for all the data the class compiled, CARE has been using the information over the past year and, in fact, reached out to some of the students to help them learn even more about certain populations.
“The research the students provided helped us craft messages we believed might overcome barriers to vaccination and influence vaccine uptake,” says Jessica Kirkwood, associate vice president at CARE. “We are so grateful to them for providing such rich and useful data to support our efforts.”
CARE continues its relationship with the Business School’s Marketing Program: This spring, another graduate marketing class is researching the impact of climate change on women around the world.
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