Gaining Trust of Bilingual Populations.

• Position: VACCINE HESITANCY

Building public trust in the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines has been a global challenge during the pandemic. Research from the University of Chicago, however, suggests that a simple language intervention could help boost vaccination rates when presenting information to people in bilingual populations.

The study found that between two groups presented with the exact same information about vaccines in two different but familiar languages, the use of one language corresponded to a seven percent higher number of people saying "yes" and a seven percent lower number of people saying "unsure" when asked about their intent to get vaccinated. The percentage of people saying "no" was about the same in both groups.

Bilingual populations exist all over the world, but the contexts in which the different languages they speak are used--and the mental associations people have with those languages--vary greatly from place to place. According to UChicago...