15 Dec Fluent’s Research Published in the Journal of the California Dental Association
Fluent’s Research Strategist Sofia Polo recently completed research on oral health literacy for our client Sesame Workshop that was included in an article published in the peer-reviewed California Dental Association Journal.
The article describes a series of activities through which UCLA and Sesame Street collaborated to develop and use oral health resources as part of a children’s oral health awareness campaign. Read an excerpt of some of Fluent’s findings below. You can read the rest of the study starting from page 771 on the December 2021 issue of the California Dental Association Journal.
Focus Groups:
Sesame Street organized a qualitative study using focus groups to examine dentists’, child care providers’ and parents’ current practices and perceptions of the barriers Chinese-speaking, Spanish- speaking, Korean-speaking, Black and Filipino families encounter with regard to the oral health of their young children. The focus groups also sought to solicit feedback on SSIC’s oral health resources.Research objectives included identifying stakeholders’ top priorities and concerns around the oral health of young children; exploring stakeholders’ current practices for promoting the oral health of young children and pinpointing where they learned about these practices; describing the challenges and barriers parents encounter in promoting the oral health of young children, including those unique to specific language/ethnic groups; and gathering feedback and recommendations on the SSIC resources and soliciting ideas for effective dissemination strategies to reach the specific language/ethnic groups. The focus groups consisted of 16 in-depth 45- to 60-minute individual interviews with dentists via Zoom and 13 90-minute virtual focus groups with mothers and child care providers conducted via Zoom.
Results:
During the lifetime of the campaign, the aim was to achieve the following goals across all platforms on social media:
- Reach 10,000 users per video at minimum.
- Achieve 25% engagement across all posts per video views.
- Receive 20,000 views per Dentist Grover video.
- Receive 50,000 views for Elmo’s Toothy Dance.
- Increase followership by 50% across all platforms.
- Recruit at least five local and/ or national partners.
Results of the awareness campaign exceeded each of the reestablished goals, with the social media campaign generating impressive metrics within a month of the release of the fifth video (FIGURE 2) and a grand total of over 687,000 views of the five featured new videos across MLAS and SSIC websites by the conclusion of the project in December 2020. Followers increased across all social media platforms, with Facebook followers showing the highest percentage increase (112%) and Instagram having the greatest number of followers (204).