First published on June 1, 2015 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

Dr. Carol Bryant was on the ground floor of the USF College of Public Health’s social marketing program when the social marketing field was in its infancy.  She credits Dr. Stan Graven, chair of the Department of Community and Family Health at the time, for the idea of a social marketing conference.

“He asked me to start a conference,” Bryant said.  “He said, ‘I think the field of social marketing has enough popularity and potential.  We need a conference on it.’”

Dr. Carol Bryant

Bryant, now USF Distinguished Health Professor in Community and Family Health, believes Graven’s own conference had convinced him of the viability of conferences in general, and specifically their ability to facilitate broad networking among stakeholders in any given field.

“It’s had a really major impact on his field,” Bryant said of what has become known as the Gravens conference, “so he could see that a conference in social marketing might be able to do the same thing.  He realized that a national conference could bring people together, disseminate the ideas, make a significant contribution to the public health community, and probably be good for branding USF.”

Bryant assented despite never having done anything of the kind or having any real idea of how to go about it.

She enlisted the help of Judy Sommers, who was at that time in charge of organizing COPH events.  She traveled to the nation’s capital to consult with two people at CDC who were well known in social marketing to ask whom to invite to speak.  She even began to think that putting a conference together might not be so difficult, after all.

“We had a really dynamic lineup of all the really active social marketers in the United States,” she said.  “We paid them all for their travel and a pretty good honorarium to come.  We promoted the conference, and we had 71 people.”

So far, so good.  There was just one problem.

“Forty or 50 of them were speakers,” she recalled, “so we lost a bundle of money.”

Bryant concluded then that the inaugural social marketing conference would also be the last, but she had a believer in Graven.

“Stan had the vision and courage to say, ‘Nope, we’re going to do it again.  Only this time, we’re not going to lose money, so let’s see how we can cut back on the budget and do better promotion.’”

Flanked by a cadre of congratulatory colleagues, Bryant (center) received a special recognition they presented her at the 2014 Social Marketing Conference.

The result was a second conference that turned the tide.  Smaller honoraria and fewer speakers fixed the early financial faux pas, along with the discovery within a few years that the honoraria could be dropped altogether.  There was enough interest in social marketing and enough respect for the conference that speakers would pay their own way to take part, and holding it at a beachfront resort didn’t hurt.

“Stan was absolutely right,” Bryant said.  “The conference would take the approach of social marketing and disseminate it in a way we couldn’t just through publications and my flying around and talking about it.”

Still, she said, social marketing’s early days at USF were lean at best.

“The early days were real tough financially,” she said.  “I was pretty terrified, actually, about how to do something like this.  Fortunately, we had good people – first Judy Sommers and then Ginger Phillips, and now Bobbi Rose – to do all the conference planning, but I didn’t realize I could just sit back and let them do that.  In the first years, I felt like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I have to learn how to do this.’”

In those early years, the Social Marketing Conference, the first of its kind anywhere, was pretty much the extent of social marketing, said Bryant, who also co-directs the Florida Prevention Research Center, a CDC-funded entity that develops and evaluates a community-based approach to social marketing.

“We did not have what we came to call the training academy yet, or the field school,” she said.  “I think I was teaching an Introduction to Social Marketing course at that time.”

Persistence pays

Bryant’s long-time social marketing partner is also her long-time partner in the bigger sense, her husband, James Lindenberger, director and faculty administrator of the Social Marketing Group.  When social marketing was launched at COPH, Lindenberger was not yet at USF, but was nonetheless a major catalyst in the start of social marketing at the university.  Together, he and Bryant founded Best Start Social Marketing, a nonprofit marketing agency with an innately symbiotic relationship with social marketing at USF.  Lindenberger was its executive director for its first 15 years.  He also is founder and former publisher of Social Marketing Quarterly, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to social marketing.

James Lindenberger

“Much of the work that we did, whether at our agency or at USF, was really done collaboratively between the two,” Lindenberger recalled.  While agreeing that the Social Marketing Conference drove at least the USF entry into the field, and probably more, he shared Bryant’s recollection of a shaky start.

“It was the first conference we’d ever put on,” he said.  “We didn’t know what we were doing, exactly, but we did have a lot of people who were instrumental in the field of social marketing, which was still a very young discipline.  We had a lot of what we thought were the important folks in the field do the presentations.”

One of those people, Lindenberger said, was Alan Andreasen, now a marketing professor at Georgetown University and executive director of the Social Marketing Institute.

“We asked him to be the closing speaker and add an exclamation point to the conference,” Lindenberger said.  “So, after a day-and-a-half of presentations, Alan got up and said, ‘Well, I want to tell you all that none of you know what social marketing is.  You’re completely wrong.’  He then proceeded to spend about 35 or 40 minutes telling us how much we had messed up.”

Lindenberger and Bryant at the recent COPH Alumni Awards

Bryant and Lindenberger laughed heartily as they recalled the incident, but said they were far from finding it amusing at the time.

“We were furious.  You left the room,” Lindenberger said, nodding to Bryant, who agreed.

“I got up,” she said, “and was just pacing in the hallway thinking, ‘I can’t take this.’”

“We were really furious,” Lindenberger continued, “because this is a guy who was really important, and a lot of people looked to him, and we wanted him to come in and say, ‘Bless you.  Thank you for doing this.  Nobody else has done it before.  We appreciate it.’  Instead, he got up and basically said, ‘You idiots.’

“After a few weeks of us getting through this, it dawned on us that he was right.  His concern was that we had had almost all communications presentations.  Almost everything we talked about was promotion.  He said, ‘That’s not what we’re about.  We aren’t advertisers, we’re marketers, and marketers do a complete and holistic look at solving problems and apply those different variables to the solutions.’”

What resulted, Lindenberger said, was a dramatic redesign of the conference for the following year.

Holding a conference at a seaside resort is a good thing, as the faces of Social Marketing Conference attendees show.

“It’s been interesting,” Bryant noted.  “That mistake was made by almost everyone we invited.  They showed off all their promotional materials and were very proud to do so, and we still have trouble with trying to make sure people don’t do that, and that our audience understands that it isn’t just advertising.

“It’s very humbling that people can sit there for two days having us tell them that maybe 20 times and still try to hire us to do TV ads.  I think it’s because most people think marketing is advertising.  It’s a hard misunderstanding to correct.”

In fact, both said the term “social marketing” has long been problematic.  Technology, it might seem, is doing all it can to keep it that way.

“It’s interesting,” Bryant said.  “It’s changed from ‘Don’t call it that, because marketing is evil’ or ‘Don’t call it social marketing, because that’s social engineering.’  Now, it’s a different debate.”

“A lot of the debate,” Lindenberger said, “seems to be rooted in younger folks coming into the field who do want to be social marketers, but when they present themselves as social marketers to their peers, their bosses or their clients, those people misinterpret that to mean social media and social media marketing.  Their concern is that it’s diminishing their ability to have an impact and also diminishing their ability to have a successful career.”

“For many of us who are kind of the old guard on this,” he continued, “our belief is there’s just so much brand equity built into it.  There’s a huge array of publications and organizations and conferences that are built around social marketing.  We would have another 30 years of building the brand up.”

“But we already have lost a lot of brand equity,” Bryant countered.  “If you Google ‘social marketing,’ you’ll get social media, even social media marketing conferences.  It is a real problem.

“In the U.S. public health system, and certainly within anthropology, it was seen as advertising and manipulation,” added Bryant, an anthropologist by training.  “I had anthropology friends who just thought I had gone totally to the dark side, but public health had a real misunderstanding about it, too, until people like Marsha Walker in Texas got it right and funded a really successful program.  That program was so successful that soon, the other agencies were asking us to do projects for them.  So, as they saw it work in this country, people in public health went, ‘Wait a minute.  Whatever it’s called, this might work for us.”

“I think what happened here at USF is a very significant part of why the discipline grew as rapidly and as successfully as it did,” Lindenberger said.  “A national program that we did out of USF and Best Start was the national breastfeeding promotion campaign for the Department of Agriculture.  That became their national brand.  It’s been used in every state in the country, is still being used, and that really brought social marketing to the foreground in Washington in a way domestically that it had never been before.”

Throw me a line

That early show of strength by the program also was a very early sign of things to come for the field, “upstream” social marketing, an approach that wouldn’t have a name for many years.

“Downstream is basically going to the individual or small group to influence their behaviors to be more positive in a particular issue, health issue or whatever it may be,” Lindenberger explained.  “Upstream is trying to look at the environment, decision-makers and the other factors that actually create a situation in which people can make change more effectively and more usefully.”

“All these people are drowning in the river downstream,” Bryant offered by way of the prevailing example in the field.  “So, you throw them educational pamphlets on how to swim or pull them out one at a time.  But upstream says, ‘No, let’s find out where they’re coming from.  Is there a bridge that’s broken?  Is something giving way?  Let’s go up there and keep them getting into the river in the beginning, instead of one by one educating them on how to survive.’  It’s a powerful metaphor, and it is catching on.”

Lindenberger noted that early applications of upstream social marketing significantly predate the metaphor.  While the national breastfeeding campaign was being developed in 1989, he said, Bryant and a pair of colleagues went to Capitol Hill and lobbied Congress for funding.

Social marketing at work at the Social Marketing Conference

“It had never been done before,” Lindenberger said, “and after that lobbying effort, $8-million was set aside specifically for breastfeeding promotion and management to be dispersed throughout the country in the WIC program.  That was upstream.  The very first project we ever did was as upstream as it gets.”

Bryant credits Andreasen for helping to widely disseminate the metaphoric term – source unknown – that has become a directional imperative for social marketing over the past decade, as well as numerous others for driving it forward.

“Many speakers at our conference, Bill Smith and Gerard Hastings from Scotland, especially, brought that metaphor alive for us and nudged us to go more upstream,” Bryant said, “and then our critics like Larry Wallach were saying the same thing,” which was that the downstream approach was blaming the victims, chiding them for not knowing how to swim well enough to save themselves.

“All those forces came together at the same time, and public health had the same realization.  We said, ‘Wait a minute.  We’d be really stupid to keep going downstream.  Let’s come up with a model that takes social marketing upstream,’ so that’s what we’ve done for the last 10 years – develop the model and test it out, and now, we’re training people in it.

“I’m hoping it will really take off.  It is more difficult to get funding, but it is more sustainable, too.”

This year, social marketing at USF COPH added to its impressive list of accolades the nation’s first MPH with a social marketing concentration.  Last year, the program celebrated the revision and re-launch of its social marketing training web site in conjunction with the Florida Prevention Research Center.  There is excitement over the field’s burgeoning relationships with other disciplines, namely engineering (humanitarian engineers) and a long-standing but still growing symbiosis with anthropology.  There also is that strengthening upstream trend.

Which way do we go?

But with all its successes, expansion, diversification and partnering, social marketing nonetheless remains a relatively new field in a time when a digital communications explosion can threaten to turn almost anything into a shape-shifter.  While few would argue that 44 successful years likely points toward anything less than a positive future, identifying potential threats can hardly be seen as unwise.

So, just where is social marketing headed?  In arguably its adolescence, what will it look like fully grown?  Who better to ask than two people who have nurtured it from infancy?

“I see a lot of dangers ahead,” Bryant said, “the big one being the brand equity diminishing because of confusion with social media marketing, and I’m not sure where I stand on the argument.  But I’m at this point kind of leaning toward maybe we do change our name, or do a qualification to it, ‘social marketing for behavior change,’ or something like that to help clarify that we’re not social media.

“Like anything, it peaks and then it falls,” she said, “and I resisted doing an MPH in social marketing, because I was afraid it was just an approach and its popularity might wane, and people with that degree – other people wouldn’t even know what they did.  I think those are some dangers that are real, but there are now so many people active in the field around the world.  We have two list serves, two journals, two conferences, and we’re thousands strong instead of just a hundred, so I think those fears are probably not warranted.”

“I agree with that,” Lindenberger offered.  “They’re not warranted.  We differ over the name issue and social media marketing.  I’m fairly comfortable with the fact that people sometimes get confused, and we can help them learn more about it if we have the chance to engage them.  And I also don’t really care.  I think we and other social marketers continue to do what we do, and if we do it well, if we produce the product successfully and deliver something to their audiences that they really need and want that will help them accomplish their own missions, then we’re fine.”

After discussing the future they anticipate for social marketing, it was time to consider the one they’d like to see.

A student poster presentation at the conference

“Something I think will happen – we’re already seeing it – that I would like more of is social marketing moving out of public health,” Bryant said.  “I think our conference taught people in public health how to apply social marketing.  Only more recently have we attracted people from other fields and changed our name from Social Marketing in Public Health to just Social Marketing Conference.

“It since then has also taken off in environmental protection.  A man named Doug McKenzie Moore, who’s a good trainer and has a wonderful web site and a list serve, has really spread it around the world for people who are working in recycling and all kinds of things.  We’re working with Qatar now to do the same thing in transportation.  Some social marketers want to see it in finance helping people to manage their finances better.

“So, what I’m hoping happens is it really does move out of just public health applications, because it could work so well in other arenas.  Healthy People 2020 has a set of objectives related to social marketing, and they want to see, by 2020, more health departments using social marketing.  I’d like to see state health departments really use it.  And the other set of objectives in Healthy People 2020 is that all schools of public health will offer at least a course in social marketing.”

“I’d like to see it be a degree program in a lot of universities around the country,” Lindenberger said.  “I think that would be a way for this to really take off – that people see it as a legitimate credential that helps them get jobs and provides them with tools to be able to influence positive change.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.

The post Pioneers of social marketing discuss its founding and its future appeared first on College of Public Health News.

Social marketing uses commercial marketing principles (e.g., solving a customer’s problem with a product or service) to achieve socially beneficial ends, such as health and safety.

Building upon previous research, Dr. Claudia Parvanta, a USF College of Public Health professor who specializes in social marketing and health communication, and colleagues helping the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (CDC/NIOSH), interviewed company leads across the United States about their experiences and perceptions of COVID-19 testing.

Testing was promoted early in the pandemic as a critical tool to ensure workplace safety.

The study, “In Search of a Value Proposition for COVID-19 Testing in the Work Environment: A Social Marketing Analysis,” was published in September in the journal IJERPH.

“In reviewing qualitative data from the original study [which looked at barriers to COVID-19 testing among U.S. employers], I saw repeated comments about COVID-19 testing products,” Parvanta said. “There were comments about the tests and their costs, accessibility [the study was conducted in early 2021, before rapid tests were widely available] and how the testing had been communicated from state and federal agencies to employers and then their workforce. I suggested we reanalyze the data using a social marketing framework: product, price, place and promotion—the so-called four Ps of social marketing.”

What Parvanta and her colleagues found was that employers felt that PCR testing for COVID-19, which requires a reading from a lab, had a poor “value proposition.” In other words, noted Parvanta, the benefit of testing—which was being able to return to work quickly if results were negative—was negated by a variety of factors, including the time it took to get PCR test results, its uncomfortable administration, the logistical arrangements necessary for worksite use and the lingering positivity in individuals who no longer were infectious or experiencing symptoms.

“COVID-19 testing has evolved since the study was done,” Parvanta acknowledged, “and now anyone should be able to acquire a home antigen test kit. The larger issue from a workplace health perspective is using these results, which have a high false-negativity rate, to allow employees who had COVID-19 to return to work and trust that employees administering the test at home are getting accurate results. Our study suggested that communications about testing, or any mitigation tactics, could be targeted to industries based on how employees perceived their risk of exposure to air-borne diseases.”

According to Parvanta and her colleagues, this is the first study to apply a social marketing approach to employer experiences and perceptions to COVID-19 testing.

“Besides providing a detailed snapshot about this period in the pandemic, it demonstrates the use of a social marketing analysis in occupational safety and health (OSH),” Parvanta said. “The Florida Prevention Research Center used social marketing to improve citrus worker safety early in the center’s existence, but social marketing is much more widely seen in chronic and infectious disease prevention directed to the public at large. Publication with this research team in this journal could lead to more social marketing in OSH and, hence, more voluntary adoption of health and safety behaviors in the workplace.”   

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

The post Using a social marketing lens to examine employers’ experiences with COVID-19 testing appeared first on College of Public Health News.

Surveys and focus groups have been the gold standard when it comes to determining whether a public service announcement (PSA) persuades people to change behavior. People would be asked to view an ad and rate it for what researchers call ‘perceived effectiveness.’ In other words, participants would rate the ad for how likely they would be to remember it or whether it grabbed their attention.

Enter Neuromarketing

“But these questions are subjective,” noted USF College of Public Health professor Dr. Claudia Parvanta, a social marketing expert. “The respondents judge how they feel and report what they might do. The perceived effectiveness scale was ‘as good as it got’ until neuromarketing technologies came on the scene, mostly in the private sector, about 20 years ago.” 

Neuromarketing measures physiological and neural signals, such as eye movement and facial expressions. While it’s been used extensively in the private sector, the technology’s prohibitive cost has put it out of reach when it comes to determining the effectiveness of public health messaging.

Until now.

Parvanta, along with a team of researchers, including Dr. Rob Hammond from USF’s Muma College of Business and Dr. Kim Walker from the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications, set out to study whether facial expression analysis—which measures human emotions through facial expressions—can predict the perceived effectiveness (PE) of Tobacco Free Florida’s (TFF) anti-tobacco PSAs. The research was funded by TFF.

Their research, “Face Value: Remote facial expression analysis adds predictive power to perceived effectiveness for selecting anti-tobacco PSAs,” was published in July in the Journal of Health Communication.

How Effective Is Facial Expression Analysis?

In the study, 302 tobacco users watched three PSAs while a webcam recorded metrics for attention, such as head position, and facial action units (e.g., eye and eyebrow movement, facial muscle movement, etc.). 

“What we found was that a specific combination of facial movements (e.g., lip suck, brow furrow, brow raise) shown more and longer COMBINED with higher attention (percent of time looking directly at the screen during the video) COMBINED with a higher PE rating—could predict 82% of the time who would fall into the ready-to-quit group (defined as those who visited the TFF website) or the not ready group (those who didn’t visit the site),” Parvanta said. “No measure alone did as good a job at predicting a participant’s behavior of going to the TFF website.”

And while the study looked only at anti-tobacco PSAs, Parvanta noted it can be extrapolated to other public health messaging. “If you wanted to set up a program—it could be for quitting smoking, but also using PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), WIC, health insurance, anything—you could put up an ad for it and by measuring facial expressions and PE, determine who is most likely to come to your program. You could then create advertising that appeals to this audience and have a better idea of who needs a different approach.” 

How Facial Technology Works

The facial analysis technology used in the study was developed by the company iMotions. It employs artificial intelligence to interpret and code “facial action units” (for example, eye and eyebrow movement, facial muscle movement, etc.). The codes are fed into a computer algorithm that was trained on millions of faces from all over the world.

“While a respondent looks at a specific video ad, the software provides ongoing probabilities that we would see specific expressions exactly when they occur (i.e., which point in the video), and for how long they endure in microseconds,” Parvanta explained. “The other important metric that the software provides is ‘attention,’ which shows whether the respondent is facing the computer screen or looking away.”

Bottom Line

According to Parvanta, all the study participants liked or disliked the same videos, but if they were ready to quit, they rated the videos more highly. “Higher ratings say more about the viewer’s state of mind than the video’s inherent persuasiveness,” she said. “When it comes to messaging, the independent measure of ready-to-quit/not ready prevents us from ‘preaching to the choir.’ As far as improving anti-tobacco ads, we hope the FDOH signs us up to do more of their pretesting work.”

Story by Donna Campisano for USF College of Public Health

The post Facing facts: Using facial expression analysis to measure PSA effectiveness appeared first on College of Public Health News.

A new herd of Bulls entered the USF College of Public Health (COPH) on Monday, Aug. 22. Whether you’re a student, faculty member or employee on campus, we are ready to be together for a year planned with more in-person events and celebrations.

New faces at the COPH

The COPH is welcomed 810 new students enrolled for the fall 2022 semester, with 492 undergraduate, 292 master’s and 26 doctoral students.

Students also saw some new faces among the college staff.

Cassandra Garza

Cassandra Garza supports the COPH’s Florida Covering Kids and Families team initiatives as a program planner analyst.

Garza’s journey at USF began through earning her BS in biomedical sciences. She has worked at USF since 2015, contributing to varying departments. Determined to advance her skills in serving diverse populations, she started the MPH program concentrating in maternal and child health. She is thrilled for the opportunity to continue to contribute to USF and the surrounding Tampa Bay community.

Sirly Castro, MBA

Sirly Castro is a fiscal and business specialist for the COPH Office of Research. As a detail and solution-oriented accountant with a strong work ethic, she provides technical assistance and financial management strategies.

Castro had been working at the USF College of Behavioral and Community Science for the past 10 years, assisting with fiscal responsibilities while supporting and guiding clients to achieve their goals and teaching them skills to be successful.

Holding an MBA in accounting, Castro has an exceptional breadth of community outreach experience and is bilingual in English and Spanish.

Rory Noonan, MPH

Rory Noonan is one of the newest members of the Florida Covering Kids and Families team, joining as a program planner analyst.

Noonan recently graduated from the COPH, earning an MPH with a concentration in health policies and programs. After earning his BS in both economics and finance, he realized that he wanted to go in a different direction with his career and chose public health. He’s happy to be making the transition to a field where he can make a positive impact as a public health professional. 

Miriam Esocabar, MA, MSPH

Miriam Escobar joined the college as a consultant for USF SafetyFlorida.

Escobar is an Air Force veteran who grew up in Chicago. She holds a BA in geography and economics from Northeastern Illinois University. After 10 years of active-duty service in the Air Force, she completed an MA in Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies and an MSPH in occupational exposure science from USF. She has worked in COVID-19 response for the Florida Department of Health and as an industrial hygienist and military contractor.

Ciarrah Silva

Ciarrah Silva joined the Florida Covering Kids & Families team as a program planner analyst.

Silva began her USF journey in 2016 as an undergraduate in the BSHS program, graduating in December 2019. During her time as a student, she began her career at USF at the RightPath Research and Innovation Center working on a research project.  She’s excited to use the skills she’s developed in her new position.

Natalie Erasme, MPH, CPH

Natalie Erasme is continuing to practice her passion as a program planner analyst for the Florida Prevention Research Center.

Erasme began her public health career as a consultant for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene after graduating from Fordham University in 2018. She then went on to obtain an MPH from the COPH in 2021.

She currently coordinates and evaluates culturally appropriate research studies that help underrepresented communities reach improved health outcomes. Erasme will be working on projects with the National COVID-19 Resiliency Network and Morehouse School of Medicine and is serving as the chair of the Southwest Florida Cancer Control Collaborative.

Silvia Moreno

Silvia Moreno is looking forward to working as the project manager for the COPH Lifelong Learning Academy. In this role, she will expand public health professional and workforce development.

In 2007, Moreno obtained her bachelor’s degree from USF in elementary education. She has served as an educator and facilitator for Hillsborough County Public Schools for the last 15 years.

Moreno is looking forward to graduating with her master’s degree in learning design and technology and with a graduate certificate in e-learning design and development from USF this fall. She is eager to coalesce her teaching and instructional design skills to develop and deliver programs of outstanding value to the community.

Ashley Tower

Ashley Tower joined the COPH as a fiscal and business specialist.

Originally from Bristol, R.I., Tower moved to Tampa in 2014 with her partner, Jesse, where they later adopted two dogs, a Siberian husky and a German shepherd. Previously working at the USF College of Arts and Sciences and the USF Operations and Facilities Management, Tower has a background in banking as well as administrative support and is excited to use her skills in this new role.

James Kakoullis, MS

James Kakoullis is happy to be joining the COPH team as a teaching laboratory manager.

Kakoullis earned his MS in chemistry from the University of California, Riverside, and has worked in private industry at an environmental testing lab in the Tampa Bay Area. He also has experience in education, teaching chemistry at St. Petersburg and Hillsborough Community Colleges.

Benjamin Gessner, MPH

Benjamin Gessner is excited to continue practicing his passion at the COPH as a statistical data analyst for the Florida Perinatal Quality Collaborative within the Chiles Center.

After graduating with his BS in health sciences, Gessner went on to pursue an MPH with a concentration in epidemiology from the COPH. During his time earning his MPH, he served as a teaching assistant for a population assessment course while also interning at the Dry Eye and Cornea Treatment Center as a data analyst.

Earlette Thompkins

Earlette Thompkins is looking forward to working with her new team within the COPH’s OSHA Training Institute Education Center. She will be a training support specialist.

Thompkins is joining the COPH from a career in the court system. She has also been employed at various school districts, working within the classroom and administration. She most recently worked within the state’s Guardian Ad Litem Office, where she held a senior administrative assistant position. She hopes that her knowledge and skill set will be an asset to the team.

Social justice + public health = a more diverse workforce

The COPH also introduces a new undergraduate-to-graduate pathway program, Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Scholar for Social Justice.

Originally known as the Maternal and Child Health Pipeline Training Program or MCH Train-A-Bull, the newly redesigned program aims to ensure a competent and diverse workforce passionate about improving health and reducing health disparities. The program provides students with a foundation in anti-racism and social justice through an exploration of systemic racism as a precursor to the social determinants of health disparities and outcomes.

Thirty undergraduate students were selected into this competitive program. They will complete a specially designed, intensive one-year curriculum that includes a community-engaged service project and two virtual, five-week summer trainings with online meetings that provide an MCH career and research foundation and guide students in applying for graduate school.

Students will work closely with MCH graduate student mentors, faculty mentors and community leaders during the program.

“I am excited to engage with students about social justice and MCH. Social justice is something I have worked in and have had a passion for since a very young age, even prior to my work in public health. It allows me to tie my interests together! I love workforce development, mentoring students and watching them grow into their own paths,” said Dr. Anna Armstrong, program director and associate professor. “We are laying the foundation for real social change at an MCH system level by empowering students with this knowledge and these skills. They will be reflective and intentional in their work, their decisions and their careers.”

Read more here.

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

The post COPH welcomes a new year full of new faces appeared first on College of Public Health News.

A warning from USF researchers: Scam artists are taking advantage of online surveys that pay for participation – a method of market research that has become more common practice since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This conclusion stems from a study that began just before the start of the pandemic in 2020. The Florida Department of Health Bureau of Tobacco Free Florida funded the USF College of Public Health and Muma College of Business to evaluate anti-tobacco public service announcements using neuromarketing measures. The researchers planned to monitor participants as they watched the PSAs using electroencephalograms, sensors that measure hand sweat and heart rate and computer software that tracks eye movements and facial expressions. 

But like many aspects of research, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the USF team to pivot its approach to an “at home” setting. They and the lab’s technology partner, iMotions, reconfigured the study and the software, limiting it to facial expression and attention analysis via webcam. Participants were also asked about the effectiveness of the PSAs, producing what’s known as a perceived effectiveness (PE) score. Many agencies and institutions rely on PE scores to identify which PSAs would be most persuasive in specific media markets.

In a study published in the journal Social Marketing Quarterly, the researchers report that the facial expression data showed a large percentage of participants may not be who they claimed to be and that their data could have dramatically shifted the results. 

Participants were required to be a current or recent tobacco user, Florida resident, and have access to a web camera. They were recruited using two methods: Through community partners sharing digital flyers and through a professional panel recruiter. The participants were offered a cash or other incentive to watch three of 12 PSAs in random order.

Despite signing a consent form that explained their faces would be recorded, 42 of the 92 responses from the “community” group were fake, either using stock photos in place of their faces or taking the survey multiple times with different IP addresses. Even the 409 responses from the vetted panel recruiter included 45 that deployed deceitful tactics, such as uploading a video of a person watching something on a screen or they demonstrated lack of engagement, which was calculated by the participant’s head position.

“This research presents a cautionary tale about compensated online surveys,” said co-author Rob Hammond, marketing instructor and director of the Center for Marketing and Sales Innovation at USF. “In addition to deliberate deceitful behavior in both the community and vetted panel groups, the lack of attention suggests individuals may approach online surveys ‘as a job’ resulting in less effort and attention.”

These findings show the impact fraudulent data can have on a study’s results. When rank-ordering the PSAs by PE score, six of the 12 would have been misjudged. More critically, two of the three top PSAs selected by the valid respondents had Black lead characters. Those same PSAs were not ranked in the top three based on the sample that included deceitful responses. 

“Public health agencies strive to develop culturally attuned health messages. It’s essential to test these messages with representatives of the intended audience,” said principal investigator Claudia Parvanta, professor and social marketing concentration lead. “We’ve learned the hard way that we need to confirm that study participants reflect the desired cultural background but also have sufficient interest in the subject under study.” 

With marketing surveys increasingly moving online, the researchers suggest that compensation should only be provided to respondents after the data have been verified. 

Reposted from USF Newsroom

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The USF College of Public Health’s Social Marketing Conference is headed back to the beach as it enters its 26th year with a continued and vigorous commitment to social marketing’s robust capacity to influence complex social problems. Based at the Sheraton Sand Key Resort in Clearwater, FL, the May 27-28 conference includes plenary sessions, interactive panels and focused collaborative sessions. A training academy will be held right before the conference on May 25-26 to provide in-depth training on the social marketing process.

The conference will attract an estimated 250 professionals working in fields such as environmental health, transportation, wildlife preservation, financial literacy, education, not-for-profit management, labor relations, the arts, health and many more.

In recognition of social marketing’s expansive reach and increasing interest in persons in other disciplines, organizers have shifted the scope of the Social Marketing Conference beyond public health to welcome all professionals who work in social marketing.

Newcomers to the field are encouraged to attend the Social Marketing Training Academy in addition to the main conference. This two-day intensive pre-conference training offers participants an opportunity to gain social marketing expertise in a concentrated time frame. Using a combination of live case studies and interactive group exercises, academy trainers help participants understand how to increase the impact of behavioral change by learning the core elements of a successful social marketing initiative.

The main conference offers a blend of plenary presentations by internationally recognized social marketing experts on topics of interest to learners at all levels; panel presentations and conversations that focus on a variety of topics relevant to the practice, application and dissemination of social marketing; continuing professional development; and “hatch labs” to enable participants to discuss ideas with each other and invited experts.

Additionally, examples of social marketing practice and research will be showcased during a poster walk and reception.

Keynote Speakers include:

• Rex Briggs, author, consultant and speaker
• Dr. Roy Eidelson, psychologist
• Sara Isaac, director of strategy and planning for Marketing for Change
• Jeffrey Jordan, president and executive creative director for Rescue Social Change Group
• Rose McGee, creator of Sweet Potato Comfort Pie
• Bill Novelli, founder of Business for Impact at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business

For additional information on the Social Marketing Conference and to register, visit http://thesocialmarketingconference.org/ or contact socialmarketing-coph@usf.edu.

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

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In June 2020, the Office of Minority Health (OMH), part of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced the award of a $40 million grant to the Morehouse School of Medicine and key strategic partners, including the USF College of Public Health’s (COPH) Florida Prevention Research Center (FPRC). Along with ICF Next, a global marketing agency, the FPRC is part of the communication cluster of the National COVID-19 Resiliency Network (NCRN).

In year one of this three-year grant, the partners have worked with community-based organizations across the nation to develop and test culturally and linguistically appropriate communication resources about vaccination for minority groups who have been particularly affected by COVID-19.

Throughout the project period, the FPRC team:

• Conducts literature reviews addressing current knowledge, attitudes and behaviors in regard to COVID-19 mitigation strategies.
• Helps develop the formative research plans and methodology.
• Provides training and technical assistance to community partners in using Community-Based Prevention Marketing (CBPM) to use social marketing to enhance messaging to specific audiences. CBPM is a program-planning framework developed by the FPRC that combines community engagement with social marketing to achieve sustainable change.
• Use neuromarketing methods to test communication materials. Neuromarketing uses physiological sensors to detect eye tracking, facial expressions and brain activity that reflect emotional response to a test stimulus, in this case, communication media developed for social media or print.

The FPRC team is training their third cohort of community organizations on what social marketing is and how they can apply it to COVID-19 vaccine uptake for the priority populations with which they work.

According to Dr. Mahmooda Khaliq Pasha, a COPH alumna and assistant professor who is a co-principal investigator on the project, “What we found is that through our approach using the community’s expertise and building  a persona, we were able to provide a vivid representation of the community and identify some of the barriers to access and the reasons behind why a specific community may not be getting vaccinated.”

Pasha said that so far, the impact of their research has been successful in helping community-based organizations to see the benefit of tailoring messaging to fit their communities rather than relying solely on generic mass media that seek to appeal to everyone.

Angela Makris, COPH PhD student and research assistant for the FPRC, presented on their research using the CBPM framework and creation of population personas at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting from October 24-27.

“Our other role in the project is pretesting materials created by an ICF Next. We collaborate with the Muma College of Business Center for Sales and Marketing Innovation, which provides the neuromarketing research software. When we collect enough data across all of the tests, we will be able to create statistical models of how emotional responses relate to attitudes about the COVID-19 vaccine, “said Dr. Claudia Parvanta, COPH professor and project principal investigator. “With neuromarketing we can test the effects of communications tailored to specific racial and ethnic backgrounds. We have long assumed this is better, but this project provides a chance to measure the effects on a deeper level than self-report.”

Read more about this story here.

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

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USF College of Engineering Professor James Mihelcic was visiting Tamatave on the east coast of Madagascar to see the work some of his former graduate students were doing on water sanitation and hygiene. That’s where he stumbled upon local artisans building hand pumps used to access shallow groundwater.

“Right in front of us, one of these artisans melted down old lead car batteries over a charcoal fire,” he said. “He poured some molten lead into a small depression in the ground he’d made from a soda pop top. Then, bingo. He had a piece for the two check valves you find in a suction pump.”

Troubled Waters

Just watching the demonstration was enough to tell Mihelcic and his colleagues that lead in the drinking water probably exceeded the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended amounts, but they tested samples anyway. Some of them came back at 100 micrograms per liter, 10 times what the WHO says is acceptable.

Lead in drinking water is neither a new problem nor one unique to developing countries like Madagascar. Consider the public health crises surrounding drinking water in places such as Flint, Mich., Newark, N.J. and Jackson, Miss. Lead is a toxic chemical pervasive in the environment. How long and how significant one’s exposure determine the severity of the health problems it causes, but overall lead exposure can damage the brain, kidneys and nervous system and slow physical and intellectual development in children.

Pumping Iron

With the help of funding from a variety of sources, including Water Charities, Pure Earth, a USF Strategic Investment Pool Award and his own personal savings, Mihelcic and his team developed a training program for local manufacturers of hand pumps that would teach them how to replace lead components with locally manufactured iron ones.

The team consists of Assistant Professor Mahmooda Khaliq Pasha, PhD ’16, from USF’s College of Public Health, Professor Jeffrey Cunningham and Assistant Professor Katherine Alfredo from the College of Engineering, and some dedicated graduate students. They’re partnering with Ranontsika, a Malagasy non-governmental organization whose aim is to improve public health by promoting access to high-quality drinking water. Local health clinics are also involved in testing the blood levels of children in the community and educating their parents about the health problems associated with lead exposure.

“After our intervention of retrofitting hand pumps with iron valve components, lead water concentrations were reduced below the WHO drinking water guideline of 10 micrograms per liter in 98 percent of pumps,” said Mihelcic, who also directs USF’s Engineering for International Development program. “The percent of pump systems that had lead concentrations reduced below our analytical detection level increased from 9.6 percent to 64 percent. It’s quite a striking improvement for a very simple fix.”

Changing out the lead components to iron ones costs about $4 per pump, Mihelcic says — a worthy expense when you factor in what lead poisoning can cost a community.

“When you consider how a country’s economy suffers because of the loss of IQ of its children, the return on the investment is extremely high,” Mihelcic said. “Prior to the intervention, we estimated that 35 percent of exposed children had a blood lead level greater than the CDC action level [5 micrograms per deciliter or less] and after the intervention we estimated only 14 percent of exposed children possessed elevated blood lead levels.”

Selling Safety

Turns out engineering a non-leaded valve replacement was the easy part. Getting the local technicians to use it — and the community to demand it — proved harder.

That’s where Pasha’s expertise came in.

Pasha is an expert in social marketing, which is behavior change — founded on commercial marketing principles — that brings about social good. She’d been collaborating with Mihelcic and some current and former students on the project on an informal basis but got more involved when she applied for an internal College of Public Health grant inviting collaboration across strategic areas.

“As you can imagine, in a community with not a high level of understanding of lead and its health consequences, sudden change in the norm can create a sense of unease,” Pasha explained. “That’s especially true if it’s initiated by folks who aren’t necessarily representatives of your community.”

Pasha and her team decided to target their social marketing campaign to the technicians locals used to fix and maintain their water pumps.

They spoke to the technicians and translated their findings into a strategy and branded initiative, holding informational and technical sessions and providing in-the-field assistance. After their training, the technicians received certificates signed by the Ministry of Health and Water along with T-shirts and overalls with the project’s branding — all important signals to the community that the project was professional and the technicians trustworthy, Pasha said.

With technicians on board, Pasha and her team are now turning their attention to the community.

“We found that sometimes the technicians didn’t want to use lead, however, a customer would insist on it because of the look of the metal or the perception that it’s heavier and better for the pump,” Pasha said. “We have intervened midstream through our work with the technicians, and now we’ll focus our work downstream so that there’s a common understanding among the community. Our project is a model for translational science. Any work that the engineers do in the future is complemented by the expertise of behavioral scientists who work to better position the product, service or behavior.”

View more information about this international, interdisciplinary project.

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of South Florida has pooled its expertise and resources in order to help influence the effectiveness of public health messaging related to COVID-19.

Researchers are collaborating with public health agencies and businesses to combine neuromarketing and biometric tools from the Muma College of Business Center for Marketing and Sales Innovation neuromarketing lab with expertise in social marketing and health communications from the College of Public Health and Zimmerman School of Advertising. Funded by a $25,000 USF COVID-19 Rapid Response grant, the neuro-social marketing research team is analyzing local print ads, television commercials and other marketing materials published online. The goal is to improve the effectiveness of messages crafted to motivate patients to resume routine appointments and seek emergency care during the pandemic. The research entails combining eye tracking, facial expression analysis and survey data to provide new insights on how people react to public health messages.

“This research is both impactful and groundbreaking,” said Rob Hammond, instructor and director of the Center for Marketing and Sales Innovation. “By adding objective biometric data to opinion surveys, we can improve message assessments based on opinion surveys to produce more effective public health messages that can in turn save lives.”

“It is important, especially for populations with pre-existing medical conditions, to return for routine health care services to maintain their health, yet, there is fear about doing so,” said principal investigator Kim Walker, associate professor of mass communications. “We have learned that people do not always report their feelings accurately on pen and paper and incorporating a neuromarketing approach can validate subjective measures to inform emotive health care advertising.”

Baycare Health System has been a key partner, providing unaired video and print materials, as well as inviting some of its patient populations to participate in the study. 

“BayCare is excited to collaborate with USF to help understand the effectiveness of public health messaging in the midst of a pandemic,” said Ed Rafalski, senior vice president and chief strategy and marketing officer for BayCare. “Through this research collaboration, our goal is to get better insight into consumers in the Tampa Bay area and how the ongoing pandemic affects their overall health care decisions.”

This project is one of several important public health research collaborations. Earlier this year, the team was awarded a three-year cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health to address the impact of COVID-19 among racial and ethnic populations. Through the National COVID-19 Resiliency Network, USF faculty and students are working with the Morehouse School of Medicine and organizations across the nation to develop and test culturally and linguistically appropriate information on resources for COVID-19 testing, health care, social services and vaccines.

“Our COVID communications begin with community input, which will make them more authentic and tailored than if we start with generic materials,” said principal investigator Claudia Parvanta, professor of social marketing and director of the Florida Prevention Research Center. “The ability to then use distance-based neuromarketing tools to see if the intended audiences respond as we hope is completely new in the social marketing and health communications field.”

The first organization to recognize the potential of USF’s neuro-social marketing research team was the Florida Department of Health Bureau of Tobacco Free Florida. It awarded the group $250,000 in early March 2020 to create a protocol for testing anti-smoking advertisements. The researchers studied how participants reacted to tobacco public service announcements and the association of these responses to intentions to quit smoking, desire to share particular videos on social media or visit the Tobacco Free Florida website to assess smoking cessation resources.

The researchers had originally planned to conduct the study in the Center for Marketing and Sales Innovation lab, which in addition to eye tracking and facial expression analysis, offers electroencephalograms (EEGs), used to study brain activity, and sensors that measure galvanic skin response, which reflects the intensity of emotion. But like many aspects of research, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the USF team to pivot its approach to evaluating the impact of these public health messages. They expedited the project by working with the lab’s technology partner, iMotions, to develop computer software that allowed researchers to continue the study remotely, using participants’ web cameras. While inconsistent lighting and positioning added complications, researchers say the process better predicted how individuals were impacted by the public service announcements rather than relying strictly on opinion scores. The team is now working to publish its findings in academic journals.

In addition to health-based projects, the Center for Marketing and Sales Innovation has partnerships with several businesses and organizations. It signed its first corporate research agreement in 2019 with Revenue Management Solutions, an international company that provides data-driven solutions and services to the restaurant industry, such as providing recommendations on menu design and navigation. The center has also conducted research that gauged public perception of political figures, such as candidate performance during the February 2020 Democratic Presidential Debate.

Reposted from USF Newsroom

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In June, the Office of Minority Health (OMH), part of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced the award of a $40 million grant to the Morehouse School of Medicine and key strategic partners, including the USF College of Public Health’s (COPH) Florida Prevention Research Center (FPRC). Along with ICF Next, a global marketing agency, the FPRC is part of the communication cluster of the National COVID-19 Resiliency Network (NCRN).

The partners will work with community-based organizations across the nation to deliver culturally and linguistically appropriate education and information on resources to help fight the pandemic, especially among minority groups who are particularly hard hit by COVID-19. The NCRN will strengthen efforts to link communities to COVID-19 testing, healthcare, social services and an eventual vaccine, and determine how to best share and implement effective response, recovery and resilience strategies.

“The FPRC is involved in this effort primarily because of our expertise in social marketing and our long and successful history of co-creating public health initiatives in partnership with communities,” said Dr. Mahmooda Khaliq Pasha, a COPH alum and assistant professor who is a co-principal investigator on the project. “Many FPRC initiatives remain in place, guided by communities, to this date. The success is attributable to the training and technical assistance we provide and how we put communities in the driver’s seat. This is what the US government, through the OMH, was seeking and what we were able to offer and provide to Morehouse.”

The FPRC’s long-standing collaborative relationship with the Morehouse School of Medicine, and in particular with the school’s Prevention Research Center, led by two-time COPH alum Dr. Tabia Henry Akintobi, a 2015 COPH Outstanding Alumni Award winner, was another reason the FPRC was asked to participate.

The COPH’s main role will be communication and dissemination. 

“The communication cluster will develop and test materials and strategies that may be used eventually to encourage all US racial and ethnic minority groups to practice behaviors known to reduce the spread of COVID-19, particularly testing and uptake of the vaccine, once it is available,” explained Dr. Claudia Parvanta, a COPH professor and director of the FPRC who is the project’s principal investigator. 

Specifically the COPH team will:

• Conduct literature reviews addressing current knowledge, attitudes and behaviors in regard to testing for COVID-19 and potential vaccine acceptance. 
• Help develop the formative research plan and methodology.
• Provide training and technical assistance to selected community partners to use Community-Based Prevention Marketing (CBPM) to get their input into development of communication messages/materials and strategies. CBPM is a program-planning framework developed by the FPRC that combines community engagement with social marketing to achieve sustainable change.
• Use neuromarketing methods to test communication materials. Neuromarketing measures neurological responses, such as eye tracking and brain activity, to measure one’s response to a product/packaging/advertising/messaging.

“Dr. Pasha and I truly believe that the participatory nature of CBPM results in empowerment of communities to use a systematic process to evaluate where gaps exist in policies, services, products or the need to change behavior. By engaging community stakeholders directly in all aspects of the research, they will see how to gather information and to use it to make changes,” said Parvanta. “There will be significant pressure to address the underlying conditions (e.g. lack of available health services, structural racism in delivery of health care or other social services) and carry the efforts out beyond the immediate pandemic.”

“The reason we are often not successful in reaching marginalized communities is because we tend to use a one-size-fits-all approach,” added Pasha. “There is a realization that we need to create culturally and linguistically appropriate messages and strategies, and they have to be coming from the communities and based in the communities. We are providing a vehicle through CBPM to get this insight and feedback and to provide ownership of this issue to the community. Our work will be essential to reducing disparities, as the work is based within the community and respecting and honoring their traditions!”

Others in the college working on the NCRN project include Dr. Dinorah Martinez Tyson as well as several graduate assistants and COPH alums working with FPRC. The project is slated to run three years, with the COPH funding amounting to just over $766,099 for the first year. The OMH will review progress annually and release funds accordingly.

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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