How do people come to opposite causal judgments about societal problems, such as whether a public health policy reduced COVID-19 cases? The current research tests an understudied cognitive mechanism in which people may agree about what "actually" happened (e.g., that a public health policy was implemented and COVID-19 cases declined),…

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced children to reckon with the causal relations underlying disease transmission. What are children's theories of how COVID-19 is transmitted? And how do they understand the relation between COVID-19 susceptibility and the need for disease-mitigating behavior? We asked these questions in the context of children's…

U.S. print news coverage of COVID vaccine hesitancy represents a departure from previous depictions of vaccine skepticism as a problem of wrong belief. This article reports on a mixed methods study of 334 "New York Times" texts about COVID nonvaccination and vaccine hesitancy published between December 2020-December 2021. Texts were…

This study aims to describe Facebook users' beliefs toward physical distancing measures implemented during the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic using the key constructs of the health belief model. A combination of rule-based filtering and manual classification methods was used to classify user comments on COVID-19 Facebook posts of three…

The purpose of this study was to describe population knowledge and beliefs about COVID-19 and current social media coverage to address a gap in what is known about risk communication during health crises. A survey with 27 questions was developed. Twenty-three percent (N = 1,136) of respondents started the survey. Less than half of the students…

A trauma-informed organization serving young children and their families experienced differentials in vaccine uptake. Organization leadership viewed this response through a trauma-informed framework that recognizes legacies of scientific racism and attendant distrust of medical information, particularly new treatments. Trauma-informed frameworks…

Coronavirus disease 2019 exacerbated health inequities in Bronx Communities. This study explored vaccine hesitancy among a random sample of faculty and students from Hebert Lehman College. Findings suggest faculty are largely vaccinated (87%), while 59% of students are unvaccinated. Significant gaps in information were found related to safety and…

Purpose: Because health misinformation pertaining to COVID-19 is a serious threat to public health, the purpose of this study is to develop a framework to guide an online intervention into some of the drivers of health misinformation online. This framework can be iterated upon through the use of design-based research to continue to develop further…

Since the spring of 2020, the pandemic has dominated public discourse. Using a public health critical race praxis research approach, our team interviewed a diverse group of individuals to elicit stories about their knowledge, attitudes, and responses to COVID-19. We used health belief model constructs and critical race theory tenets to evaluate…