Using social media surveys and interventions to address vaccine hesitancy in Saudi Arabia.

Background: Countering COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has been a challenge in Saudi Arabia, one of the countries affected most by the pandemic in the Eastern Mediterranean Region.

Aims: To identify information needs, perceived benefits, concerns, trusted information sources, social norms, and predictors for COVID-19 vaccine uptake in Saudi Arabia and identify effective messaging strategies to increase vaccination intentions among the unvaccinated.

Method: Between March and April 2021, we conducted an online cross-sectional survey ( = 2883), and in part, a randomized experiment for unvaccinated participants ( = 675) in Saudi Arabia using Facebook Ads and Messenger.

Challenges to capture the big five personality traits in non-WEIRD populations.

Can personality traits be measured and interpreted reliably across the world? While the use of Big Five personality measures is increasingly common across social sciences, their validity outside of western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations is unclear. Adopting a comprehensive psychometric approach to analyze 29 face-to-face surveys from 94,751 respondents in 23 low- and middle-income countries, we show that commonly used personality questions generally fail to measure the intended personality traits and show low validity. These findings contrast with the much higher validity of these measures attained in internet surveys of 198,356 self-selected respondents from the same countries.