Justification for CET W98 and Creative Testing 05-01-2023

CET W98 (fields 5/5 - 5/7): 

As part of the COVID-19 Public Education Campaign market research efforts, the Current Events Tracker (CET) is a flexible survey vehicle designed for easy addition or removal of questions as applicable to the current environment. This wave re-fields questions on trust in HHS and CDC, time to wait for updated vaccine, awareness of the public health emergency and attendant changes in COVID-related costs, and information seeking. New or modified questions include those on insurance status, second updated vaccine dose, variant awareness and attitudes, and messages to test. 

Creative Testing (fields 5/5 - 5/12)

The Market Research emergency clearance package OMB approved in January 2021 covers a series of Creative Testing Surveys to evaluate national television advertisements for various audiences. The survey tests thirty-second television ads to help determine how the creative may impact audience attitudes and intentions to get a COVID-19 vaccine. As noted within the original submission, the composition of audiences and content will change between iterations to accommodate the current state of COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccination.

As such, a new wave of Creative Testing Surveys will be conducted to evaluate a new set of television advertisements, which include a total market audience (general population) ad, a Black audience ad, and a Spanish-speaking Latino ad. We revised “COVID-19” to “COVID” throughout our survey to better reflect how the public talks about COVID-19 and to align with how our creative messages refer to the disease. We also updated question wording to better align with OMB recommendations for asking about gender. In addition, we updated some answer choices to improve clarity and be more inclusive of potential answers, such as why a person has not received an updated COVID-19 vaccine.

As in previous waves of the study, we will recruit 1,000 updated vaccine eligible participants for the total market and Black audience study and 250 Spanish-speaking, updated vaccine eligible participants. The number of participants has increased to accommodate new research with Spanish-speaking audiences. In general, we will recruit participants with a variety of demographic backgrounds to match the general U.S. population by gender, age, education, race/ethnicity, and geographic region.

Approval of these changes allows the program to conduct a study consistent with the current environment in order to secure actionable insights to inform the ongoing HHS ASPA COVID-19 Public Education Campaign.