SPH Study Analyzes Instagram for Child Injury Prevention Messages

ALBANY, N.Y (Feb. 17, 2022) — A recent study from the School of Public Health shows that Instagram posts promoting injury prevention messages to parents often depict images that do not show the desired safety recommendation or provide a clear action that parents should take — resulting in confusion on how they can best keep their children safe.

Unintentional injury is the leading cause of death for children, and each year more than 9 million children are treated in hospitals for injuries such as burns, falls, poisoning and road traffic incidents. Since studies show that many parents like to receive information online for child safety, social media presents a unique opportunity to share injury prevention messages on high-traffic platforms. However, few studies have looked at the landscape of child injury prevention messages on Instagram — where over 1 billion active users view and respond to content on a fast-paced, scrolling platform.

“A part of the problem health communicators face has to do with the nature of social media,” explains Jennifer Manganello, professor of Health Policy, Management and Behavior, who led the study. “People quickly scan content and typically only see a post for a second or two, especially on a platform like Instagram. This means that organizations creating injury prevention messages need to be clear and specific with the messages and imagery used to ensure the posts support the health behavior they are trying to promote.”

The research team, including MPH student Cassandra Kane and collaborators at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, examined the social media channels of national organizations that are considered key disseminators of information in the injury prevention field. Organizations included children’s hospitals, pediatric health organizations, parenting organizations and government agencies. The posts, from May 2018 to April 2019, were analyzed to collect information such as the type of injury messages, the hashtags used and whether the image matched the topic of the post.

The posts ranged in topic, with drowning, car safety, sleeping safety and general safety (such as household childproofing) as the most common topics. Forty-two percent of the Instagram posts had an image that did not match the topic of the post, and only 71 percent provided a clear action for parents to take to prevent injury. Fifty percent of the posts did not have a clear image to communicate the desired safety recommendation.

“Social media is a valuable tool to educate parents about injury prevention and has the potential to improve injury prevention behaviors as long as the recommendations are clear to the intended audience,” says Manganello. “It’s important to eliminate confusion by using clear and direct language and appropriate images to increase a post’s success.”

Factors other than the messages are important as well.

“Dissemination of messages on social media should consider the specific audiences that follow the account along with the target audiences. This means ensuring that messages are culturally competent, accessible and health literate,” says Manganello. “To further reduce pediatric accidental injury, more work research and analysis must be done in this area to enable leaders in injury prevention messaging to use social media to its full potential.”

The full research report can be found in the Journal of Health Communication.