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How to reduce vaccination hesitancy? The relevance of evidence and its communicator()
Even though the immediate urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have passed, many countries did not reach the vaccination rates they initially aimed for. The stagnation in vaccine uptake during the height of the pandemic presented policy makers with a challenge that remains unresolved and is par...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Elsevier Ltd.
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10200368/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37221120 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2023.03.026 |
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author | Eger, Jens Kaplan, Lennart C. Sternberg, Henrike |
author_facet | Eger, Jens Kaplan, Lennart C. Sternberg, Henrike |
author_sort | Eger, Jens |
collection | PubMed |
description | Even though the immediate urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have passed, many countries did not reach the vaccination rates they initially aimed for. The stagnation in vaccine uptake during the height of the pandemic presented policy makers with a challenge that remains unresolved and is paramount for future pandemics and other crises: How to convince the (often not insubstantial) unvaccinated proportion of the population of the benefits of a vaccination? Designing more successful communication strategies, both in retrospect and looking ahead, requires a differentiated understanding of the concerns of those that remain unvaccinated. Guided by the elaboration likelihood model, this paper has two objectives: First, it explores by means of a latent class analysis how unvaccinated individuals might be characterized by their attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination. Second, we investigate to what extent (i) varying types of evidence (none/anecdotal/statistical) can be employed by (ii) different types of communicators (scientists/politicians) to improve vaccination intentions across these subgroups. To address these questions, we conducted an original online survey experiment among 2145 unvaccinated respondents from Germany where a substantial population share remains unvaccinated. The results suggest three different subgroups, which differ regarding their openness towards a COVID-19 vaccination: Vaccination opponents (N = 1184), sceptics (N = 572) and those in principle receptive (N = 389) to be vaccinated. On average, neither the provision of statistical nor anecdotal evidence increased the persuasiveness of information regarding the efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine. However, scientists were, on average, more persuasive than politicians (relatively increase vaccination intentions by 0.184 standard deviations). With respect to heterogeneous treatment effects among the three subgroups, vaccination opponents seem largely unreachable, while sceptics value information by scientists, particularly if supported by anecdotal evidence (relatively increases intentions by 0.45 standard deviations). Receptives seem much more responsive to statistical evidence from politicians (relatively increases intentions by 0.38 standard deviations). |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10200368 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Elsevier Ltd. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-102003682023-05-22 How to reduce vaccination hesitancy? The relevance of evidence and its communicator() Eger, Jens Kaplan, Lennart C. Sternberg, Henrike Vaccine Article Even though the immediate urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have passed, many countries did not reach the vaccination rates they initially aimed for. The stagnation in vaccine uptake during the height of the pandemic presented policy makers with a challenge that remains unresolved and is paramount for future pandemics and other crises: How to convince the (often not insubstantial) unvaccinated proportion of the population of the benefits of a vaccination? Designing more successful communication strategies, both in retrospect and looking ahead, requires a differentiated understanding of the concerns of those that remain unvaccinated. Guided by the elaboration likelihood model, this paper has two objectives: First, it explores by means of a latent class analysis how unvaccinated individuals might be characterized by their attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination. Second, we investigate to what extent (i) varying types of evidence (none/anecdotal/statistical) can be employed by (ii) different types of communicators (scientists/politicians) to improve vaccination intentions across these subgroups. To address these questions, we conducted an original online survey experiment among 2145 unvaccinated respondents from Germany where a substantial population share remains unvaccinated. The results suggest three different subgroups, which differ regarding their openness towards a COVID-19 vaccination: Vaccination opponents (N = 1184), sceptics (N = 572) and those in principle receptive (N = 389) to be vaccinated. On average, neither the provision of statistical nor anecdotal evidence increased the persuasiveness of information regarding the efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine. However, scientists were, on average, more persuasive than politicians (relatively increase vaccination intentions by 0.184 standard deviations). With respect to heterogeneous treatment effects among the three subgroups, vaccination opponents seem largely unreachable, while sceptics value information by scientists, particularly if supported by anecdotal evidence (relatively increases intentions by 0.45 standard deviations). Receptives seem much more responsive to statistical evidence from politicians (relatively increases intentions by 0.38 standard deviations). Elsevier Ltd. 2023-06-19 2023-05-22 /pmc/articles/PMC10200368/ /pubmed/37221120 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2023.03.026 Text en © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. |
spellingShingle | Article Eger, Jens Kaplan, Lennart C. Sternberg, Henrike How to reduce vaccination hesitancy? The relevance of evidence and its communicator() |
title | How to reduce vaccination hesitancy? The relevance of evidence and its communicator() |
title_full | How to reduce vaccination hesitancy? The relevance of evidence and its communicator() |
title_fullStr | How to reduce vaccination hesitancy? The relevance of evidence and its communicator() |
title_full_unstemmed | How to reduce vaccination hesitancy? The relevance of evidence and its communicator() |
title_short | How to reduce vaccination hesitancy? The relevance of evidence and its communicator() |
title_sort | how to reduce vaccination hesitancy? the relevance of evidence and its communicator() |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10200368/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37221120 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2023.03.026 |
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