The Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, Division of Public Health hired Agnew::Beck to facilitate a series of focus groups aimed at understanding how parents and caregivers make decisions to vaccinate or not vaccinate their children. Agnew::Beck worked closely with the state’s Immunization Improvement Workgroup to develop the focus group recruitment methodology and focus group questions. The project team worked hard to involve people from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds and to remove participation barriers by providing food, financial incentives, and childcare to focus group participants. Agnew::Beck held three focus groups in Southcentral Alaska. Audience response technology was used at each focus group to help understand participant views and to provide a foundation for subsequent discussion and conversations. Feedback from the focus groups was supplemented by a series of interviews with Fairbanks residents. Agnew::Beck condensed the results from the focus groups and interviews into a report that provided a detailed summary of the project background, methodology, and key findings from the focus group/interview process, as well as a set of recommendations for how the state can use the results to enhance the state’s immunization-related informational offerings and programs.
