The PHORECAST Dataset

Repository: https://github.com/rifaaQ/PHORECAST

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02535

Dataset Details

PHORECAST (Public Health Outreach REceptivity and CAmpaign Signal Tracking) is a multimodal dataset curated to enable fine-grained prediction of both individual-level behavioral responses and community-wide engagement patterns to health messaging. The dataset maps the characteristics of diverse individuals onto their reactions from interacting with health marketing content.

Dataset Description

Each participant:

1. Profiled Background – demographics, Big Five traits, locus of control, baseline health opinions.

2. Reviewed Campaigns – free-text and Likert-scale reactions to five curated campaigns.

Campaigns span seven categories:Nutrition & Diabetes, Vaccination / HIV / AIDS, Mental Health, Substance Abuse, Sexual Practices, COPD / Smoking, Chronic Diseases (e.g., Heart Disease, Cystic Fibrosis, Arthritis) and are annotated with target behavior, target population, and message type (Informative, Persuasive-Efficacy, Persuasive-Threat).

Please refer to our paper to learn more about how public health experts collected the campaign database.

• Curated by: Researchers from the University of Maryland, College Park.
• Language(s) (NLP): English
• License: The dataset is available under the Creative Commons NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Uses

The Dataset is provided for the purpose of research and educational use in the field of natural language processing, conversational agents, social science and related areas; and can be used to develop or evaluate artificial intelligence, including Large Vision Language Models (VLMs).

Direct Use

Evaluate vision-language models, study variability in campaign receptivity, guide health message design.

Out-of-Scope Use

The dataset should not be used for applications requiring verified factual accuracy, critical decision-making, or any malicious or unethical activities.

Dataset Structure

Each row consists of an individual's reaction (both numerical and te to one public health campaign, alongside their demographic and personality information.

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

The PHORECAST dataset aims to map real human profiles (demographics, personality, and locus of control) to their responses / reactions from interacting with various public health campaigns. The primary purpose is for academic research to study how different people interact with stimuli and simulate how and why different communities respond differently to visuals. The results will be used to build an AI simulator that can mimic real world communities.

Source Data

Data Collection and Processing

All collection and processing stages were done using Python. More information can be found in the paper and on our github.

Who are the source data producers?

Correspondence to [email protected]

Annotations [optional]

Annotation process

[More Information Needed]

Who are the annotators?

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Personal and Sensitive Information

[More Information Needed]

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

The dataset is primarily in English, limiting global applicability of our method. Sample Representation: While the dataset includes over 1,000 participants across diverse demographics, it is not fully representative of all populations. Certain groups (e.g., older adults, low-literacy populations, or non-English speakers) are underrepresented. Contextual Biases: Responses are shaped by the cultural and temporal context in which the data were collected (e.g., during/after global health crises).

Recommendations

Users should be made aware of the risks, biases and limitations of the dataset. More information needed for further recommendations.

Citation [optional]

BibTeX:

@misc{qadri2025phorecastenablingaiunderstanding, title={PHORECAST: Enabling AI Understanding of Public Health Outreach Across Populations}, author={Rifaa Qadri and Anh Nhat Nhu and Swati Ramnath and Laura Yu Zheng and Raj Bhansali and Sylvette La Touche-Howard and Tracy Marie Zeeger and Tom Goldstein and Ming Lin}, year={2025}, eprint={2510.02535}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, primaryClass={cs.CY}, url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02535}, }

APA:

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Dataset Card Contact

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