Collaboration: assessing the impact of male-caregiver-focused immunization sensitization
Can you assess trust through a simple, open conversation about health and vaccines? This is the question we've been working with PATH Kenya to answer.
Respondent burnout is real. Across our work in vaccine demand, we've witnessed caregivers in hard-to-reach communities experiencing research fatigue from repeated, lengthy surveys and questionnaires. This not only affects data quality but also strains the relationship between communities, on-the-ground organizations & their health system partners. Addressing this challenge requires new approaches to trust measurement — ones that are rigorous yet nimble, capturing what matters without exhausting respondents. That's exactly what we're testing through our collaboration with PATH Kenya.
PATH Kenya is an organization that designs and implements innovative solutions to complex health challenges and strengthens health systems. Its Living Labs program uses human-centered approaches and processes, leveraging deep linkages to communities and local health system actors to co-create effective interventions.
As part of the Zero-Dose Learning Agenda (ZDLA), a collaborative initiative led by the Gates Foundation, PATH has been delivering Chanjo Talks Kazini (CTK)—an intervention targeting male caregivers of under-one children in Homa Bay County, Kenya. CTK brings group sensitization sessions to male caregivers at their workplaces and in key community spaces. The intervention's goals are to:
Increase male caregivers' knowledge about vaccines and vaccination while addressing negative beliefs and myths
Strengthen male caregivers' emotional and practical support to their partners around their children's immunization
Improve vaccine uptake among zero-dose households while reducing default on vaccination overall
To assess CTK's impact on trust, we're deploying the Conversational Trust Tool—an innovative qualitative data collection method based on the Trust Framework. The Vaccine Trust Project team is working with PATH to measure trust levels among targeted male caregivers and their female partners, comparing them with a similar cohort in a neighboring control community. This prototype tool pulls from the structure surveys provide and the open-ended nature of semi-structured ethnographic interviews, aiming to help field practitioners assess the most salient dimensions of trust for each household and community in a targeted, colloquial way — with the aim to significantly reduce respondent burden.
ReD and PATH will work together to gather learnings on:
what makes successful trust-building interventions—particularly those working at a collective level
the Conversational Tool's performance as a nimble, easy-to-deploy trust assessment approach. We'll explore whether this tool can reliably capture trust changes, maintain consistency across fieldworkers, and elicit authentic responses while reducing the burden on both research teams and respondents.
Stay tuned for more!
