Innovating Research Methods: AI, Digital Tools & Participatory Inquiry

Entertainment media not only reflects but also shapes social norms, including gender norms, and cultural values. Yet, systematic and scaled measurement of what media actually portrays has been limited, especially outside high-resource contexts such as the United States. The Mapping Gender Norms in Media (MAPGEN) Initiative, a collaborative partnership between the World Bank, the University of Southern California Norman Lear Center, and the University of Pennsylvania Computational Social Listening Lab is pioneering the use of contextually grounded AI tools to analyze thousands of films, television episodes, and millions of online videos across multiple countries to benchmark time trends and cross-cultural differences in how gender roles and values are portrayed in media.
This session will focus on providing summit attendees with an overview of this innovative project focusing on how well-contextualized AI models can support and scale content analytics to inform SBCC programming. The session will also provide a first look at the MAPGEN Monitor for exploring findings from the initiative's cross-country analysis of gender norms in media to shape advocacy and communication efforts of the global SBCC community. 

Collecting evidence in digital SBCC research requires tools that resonate with youth realities. The C'est La Vie! initiative piloted different platforms-Facebook, TikTok, and WhatsApp-to explore how digital environments shape both engagement and data collection for sexual and reproductive health (SRHR) research. Early campaigns on Facebook faced challenges: account blocks, survey restrictions, and limited participation among 15–24-year-olds, who represent the target audience. WhatsApp pilots revealed higher responsiveness and confidentiality, but interactions remained superficial (emojis, short reactions), with limited group debates. TikTok pilots highlighted strong youth presence and creative engagement with videos, but technical challenges (visibility of posts, inactive accounts) constrained structured interactions. Key lessons include: (1) platform choice influences not only campaign reach but also the quality of evidence collected; (2) WhatsApp enables private, gender-sensitive engagement but complicates scale; (3) TikTok enhances reach and creativity but requires strategies (hashtags, incentives) to strengthen consistent engagement; and (4) hybrid approaches-using TikTok to attract and WhatsApp to deepen dialogue-are promising. These findings underscore that innovation in evidence is not only about new tools but about rethinking which platforms best capture youth voices and how platform dynamics shape data quality.  

Storytelling is a powerful tool in SBCC, often used to create relatable narratives that deepen emotional resonance and improve message retention. Similarly, personas are profiles of fictional characters that represent target audiences' emotions, attitudes, and behaviours. This tool is widely used in human-centred design to guide empathy and intervention planning. However, personas are often crafted by external researchers or based on prior research, which can miss the opportunity to empower communities to shape the narrative using their lived experience. 
This presentation shares a transformative experience from a series of co-creation workshops in Uganda, Ghana, and Nigeria, where we flipped the script by empowering participants to develop personas that guided workshop discussions. After reflecting on how externally created personas can bias participants toward predefined frameworks, we invited them to build and present character narratives through oral storytelling traditions. The result was richer insights and more culturally relevant findings, using local terminology and concepts that reflected real community dynamics. This approach enabled a quick and accessible bottom-up method of data segmentation, where the narratives captured diverse experiences of target audiences.  
The presentation will explore how this approach can help both participants and researchers visualise where barriers accumulate for various target audiences and inspire more specialised interventions. This approach aligns with the Summit's theme, Knowledge and Evidence: Rethinking what counts and who decides, by developing truly co-design tools that empower communities to reclaim ownership of the narratives influencing the design of interventions that serve them. 

Reports of treatment fatigue are increasingly common as people reach 5, 10, or 20 years living with HIV. But the issue is not simply pill-taking, which is generally easy and free of side effects. Rather, the challenge often lies in the complex and evolving mix of emotions that the pill can evoke, confounded by factors such as other acute and chronic health conditions, gaps and fluctuations in social and clinical support, and overall life changes. 

To better understand these emotional associations, we listened to people living with HIV in Malawi, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, with particular attention to vulnerable groups. Using a personification technique, we asked participants to imagine their pill as a person and then describe their relationship with that person.   
Responses revealed deep ambivalence: While treatment is recognized as lifesaving, some experience the 'relationship' as conditional, controlling, and even coercive. 

Adherence counselling typically emphasizes the clinical while neglecting the emotional. Two shifts are needed. First, empathy: validating someone's feelings as normal and providing a safe space to reframe them. Second, respect for agency: offering information and encouraging informed choice rather than framing treatment as an imposed mandate.  
HIV treatment is simple. The emotions around it are not. Our counselling needs to bear that in mind.