Aronson ID, Bennett AS, Ardouin-Guerrier MA, Rivera-Castellar GJ, Gibson BE, Vargas-Estrella B. Using the participatory education and research into lived experience (PEARLE) methodology to localize content and target specific populations.
Front Digit Health 2022;
4:992519. [PMID:
36339513 PMCID:
PMC9634163 DOI:
10.3389/fdgth.2022.992519]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/12/2022] [Accepted: 09/27/2022] [Indexed: 11/05/2022] Open
Abstract
Technology-based behavioral health interventions offer potentially limitless opportunities to localize content and target specific populations. However, this ability to customize requires developers to make a wide range of decisions not only about who should appear on screen, but how each message should be refined to most effectively reach a particular group of intervention recipients. These issues become especially salient as interventions are scaled for delivery to multiple populations in different geographical locations or settings (e.g., a hospital emergency department versus the drop-in center of a community-based clinic), and in more than one language. To facilitate evidence-based development of customized, targeted intervention content, our team created a multi-step methodology over a series of NIH-funded research projects. The resulting Participatory Education and Research into Lived Experience (PEARLE) Methodology entails formative qualitative interviews to examine why members of a given population do not enact a specific health behavior such as HIV/HCV testing or vaccinating against COVID-19 (this step includes identifying potential gaps in related health literacy), followed by iterative evaluations of draft content designed to address these barriers, and extensive discussions with a Community Advisory Board. The final step is a clinical trial. PEARLE is designed to be highly flexible, adaptable to a variety of behavioral outcomes in clinical and community settings, and to create content in more than one language depending on the needs or preferences of a population. The current paper discusses how our team employed PEARLE to develop content in English and Spanish for our latest project, which is intended to increase COVID-19 vaccination uptake among people who inject drugs.
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