Behavioral
Insights Lab

Inexpensive, near-real-time behavioral research has the potential to revolutionize public health campaigns and programming – making them more efficient and effective.

By leveraging the power of social and digital platforms alongside scientifically proven behavior models, the Behavioral Insights Lab is making behavioral science research more accessible to practitioners by making it less expensive, faster, and immediately actionable. 

TYPES OF SURVEY RESEARCH

Our team honed its skills with these tools while using them to support the measurement and evaluation of social behavior change campaigns run on social media. Types of research that is well suited to our tools and approach include:

  • A one-round cross-sectional survey can be extremely useful to a broad range of program implementers who seek insights about their target audiences. 

  • This approach allows us to measure changes in outcomes over time. 

  • These are great for comparing people who have been exposed to an intervention (treatment group) with those who have not (control group). There are many ways to create intervention vs. control groups. 

  • Survey panels can be designed and administered in many ways. A panel of respondents is interviewed over the course of months or years.  Panel surveys track changes in audience beliefs, behaviors, and norms among the same individuals over time. 

BACKGROUND

BiL was launched in 2022, but our team has been at the forefront of utilizing social media and digital platforms to discover actionable insights to guide health campaigns since the early 2000s. In 2016, Upswell was the first to use Facebook data and APIs to gain key insights into how people discussed and thought about crucial health decisions. The impact of that effort can be seen on campaigns like the one UNICEF Brazil ran during a devastating zika outbreak. Our efforts on this front were the precursor to what is now Meta’s Data for Good team. 

Since those early years, the ability to tap into social data for research purposes has significantly decreased. Fortunately, even as the value of traditional social listening has diminished, our ability to leverage social and digital platforms for high-quality behavioral research has increased. 

Just as our team was an early enabler of tapping into social data to inform health messaging, we are at the forefront of this next wave of tapping social media to generate insights to improve health outcomes.