Using comics and curiosity to drive pandemic research on a national scale

Comic illustration by Dr Ciléin Kearns (Artibiotics)

Public engagement connects scientists with the public who make our work possible, and whom it should ultimately serve. Much has been published about why this is important, but there has been limited research showing the benefit with hard numbers, which is important to justify the efforts in practice.

With almost 19,000 responses over six days, we were able to show that a survey research approach featuring comics outperformed a standard approach in terms of the number of people reached, public engagement, gender and ethnic diversity amongst respondents, and cost-effectiveness of advertising.

We look forward to sharing and supporting more research with comics! Have you seen any good examples used during the pandemic?

Those with Institutional Access can read the full article in the Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine here:

https://doi.org/10.1080/17453054.2020.1823206