A research platform for measuring information exposure, trust, and behaviour – burden of infodemics

BACKGROUND: During a health emergency, accurate and useful information can be drowned out by legitimate questions, concerns, information voids, conflicting information, and misinformation. Very few studies connect information exposure and trust to health behaviours and health outcomes, which limits available evidence to inform when and where to act to mitigate infodemics, especially in low resource settings. We have developed a toolkit that can support studies linking information exposure to health behaviours at the individual level and therefore can help estimate burden of infodemics at population level. METHODS: We developed and validated a research toolkit to measure topic-specific information exposure and health behaviors. We evaluated it in realistic scenarios to understand the usability of the toolkit. RESULTS: We address researcher requirements via a web-based study platform that includes an app that participants use to record topic-specific information exposure, a browser plugin for tracking access to relevant webpages, questionnaires that can be delivered at any time during a study, and app-based incentives for participation such as visual analytics to compare trust levels with other participants. Platform features include tailoring studies to local contexts, ease of use for participants, and frictionless sharing of de-identified data for aggregating individual participant data in international meta-analyses. The toolkit was improved for usability to researchers and study participants. CONCLUSIONS: When applied in research studies, as per proposed protocol and with Institutional Review Board ethics clearance, this toolkit can capture detailed data about information exposure and health behaviour data, standardise study design while supporting localisation, and make it easy to synthesise individual participant data across studies. This will facilitate estimations of population-level estimated of impact of information diets on health behaviors and health outcomes. KEY MESSAGES: • The toolkit will make it easy to synthesise results in a global meta-analysis, also by researchers in resource poor settings. • Next steps include establishing a coordinating site to support training in regional centres to turn meta-analyses into ongoing monitoring of the global burden of infodemics.