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This summer, I had the opportunity to study misinformation regarding the COVID-19 vaccine found in social media under the mentorship of Dr. Melanie Kornides from Penn Nursing and with two other undergraduates. As the COVID-19 vaccine rolls out in America, many people refuse the vaccination due to various concerns, hindering public health efforts to control the spread of the virus. Many healthcare workers express similar hesitancy, an aspect we focus on in the research. My first task was to understand vaccine hesitancy through reading published research articles. As I read through these articles, I compared the common themes and drafted a list of possible reasons for someone to support the vaccine or express concern. This task led my group and me to develop the codebook, which is used to generate a coding survey on REDCap for data extraction. An important step we conducted before beginning the official data extraction was refining the codebook. We refined our codebook three times to ensure our codebook captures as much data as expressed through the tweets and continue to adjust the survey during the official coding process. My main task was to conduct a qualitative content analysis of the tweets. We expand the study to include sentiment toward vaccine delivery. This learning experience supported by PURM consists of exploring the world of academia, gaining technical research skills, and obtaining content that complements my education.

I look forward to continuing my work with Dr. Kornides on the current project and am excited to see what next research project I will get involved in.

To see my poster, visit Penn Presents: https://presentations.curf.upenn.edu/poster/misinformation-about-covid-…

This summer, I had the opportunity to study misinformation regarding the COVID-19 vaccine found in social media under the mentorship of Dr. Melanie Kornides from Penn Nursing and with two other undergraduates. As the COVID-19 vaccine rolls out in America, many people refuse the vaccination due to various concerns, hindering public health efforts to control the spread of the virus. Many healthcare workers express similar hesitancy, an aspect we focus on in the research. My first task was to understand vaccine hesitancy through reading published research articles. As I read through these articles, I compared the common themes and drafted a list of possible reasons for someone to support the vaccine or express concern. This task led my group and me to develop the codebook, which is used to generate a coding survey on REDCap for data extraction. An important step we conducted before beginning the official data extraction was refining the codebook. We refined our codebook three times to ensure our codebook captures as much data as expressed through the tweets and continue to adjust the survey during the official coding process. My main task was to conduct a qualitative content analysis of the tweets. We expand the study to include sentiment toward vaccine delivery. This learning experience supported by PURM consists of exploring the world of academia, gaining technical research skills, and obtaining content that complements my education.

I look forward to continuing my work with Dr. Kornides on the current project and am excited to see what next research project I will get involved in.

To see my poster, visit Penn Presents: https://presentations.curf.upenn.edu/poster/misinformation-about-covid-…