As a Fellow placed at the Public Health Research Institute of India (PHRII), my work focused on cervical cancer screening and prevention, particularly promoting uptake of the HPV vaccine among adolescent girls. Over the course of my Fellowship, I gained substantial exposure to qualitative research design and analysis—skills that proved foundational to developing health communication tools grounded in cultural and contextual relevance.
Early on in my Fellowship journey, I had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting of organized between PHRII and our partners, making up the Mysuru Consortium Against Cervical Cancer (MCACC). The objective of this session was to evaluate an educational video targeted at women, designed to motivate cervical cancer screening behaviors. As a group, we provided detailed, frame-by-frame feedback on several elements: cultural competence of the script, clarity and simplicity of language, the narrative’s flow, and the overall accuracy and appropriateness of the messaging. It became evident to me that even subtle choices—such as tone of voice, pacing, and metaphor usage—can significantly affect how health messages are interpreted, especially in communities with wide variability in health literacy.
This experience emphasized the necessity of audience-centered design. It reinforced that effective public health communication is not only about scientific accuracy, but also about ensuring that the audience can connect to the material both cognitively and emotionally.
Building on these insights, I developed my own educational video script targeting girls aged 9–14 to promote HPV vaccination. This required not only simplification of biomedical information, but also careful attention to the Behavioral and Social Drivers of Vaccination (BeSD) framework, which I used as a guiding structure. The BeSD domains—Thinking and Feeling, Social Processes, Motivation, and Practical Issues—helped ensure the content was behaviorally relevant, context-sensitive, and theoretically sound.
The biggest challenge I encountered was the constraint of time: distilling essential HPV and vaccine-related information into a format accessible to a young audience within a one-minute limit required significant iteration. The exercise taught me how to prioritize key behavioral drivers without overwhelming the viewer, and to rely on storytelling and visual metaphors that could resonate across levels of health literacy.
My engagement with qualitative research continued as I developed evaluation tools to assess the impact of the video. I designed open-ended, BeSD-aligned questions to explore how viewers interpreted the video, what aspects were most memorable or persuasive, and whether any hesitations or misconceptions remained. In parallel, I created quantitative instruments to assess pre- and post-intervention knowledge and awareness levels, providing a mixed-methods approach to evaluation.
Through these experiences, I came to appreciate the centrality of qualitative methods in the development and assessment of public health interventions. Focus group discussions, open-ended survey instruments, and audience co-creation processes all underscore the value of listening before designing. These tools do more than inform—they ensure that communication strategies are rooted in the lived experiences, language, and cultural logic of the communities they seek to serve.
Going forward, I plan to continue integrating qualitative research into my public health work. Whether designing interventions, evaluating impact, or advocating for behavior change, I now understand that qualitative insight is not supplementary—it is essential.
