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Vaccine Hesitancy and Anti-Vaccination Attitudes during the Start of COVID-19 Vaccination Program: A Content Analysis on Twitter Data

Twitter is a useful source for detecting anti-vaccine content due to the increasing prevalence of these arguments on social media. We aimed to identify the prominent themes about vaccine hesitancy and refusal on social media posts in Turkish during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this qualitative study, w...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Küçükali, Hüseyin, Ataç, Ömer, Palteki, Ayşe Seval, Tokaç, Ayşe Zülal, Hayran, Osman
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8876163/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35214620
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vaccines10020161
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author Küçükali, Hüseyin
Ataç, Ömer
Palteki, Ayşe Seval
Tokaç, Ayşe Zülal
Hayran, Osman
author_facet Küçükali, Hüseyin
Ataç, Ömer
Palteki, Ayşe Seval
Tokaç, Ayşe Zülal
Hayran, Osman
author_sort Küçükali, Hüseyin
collection PubMed
description Twitter is a useful source for detecting anti-vaccine content due to the increasing prevalence of these arguments on social media. We aimed to identify the prominent themes about vaccine hesitancy and refusal on social media posts in Turkish during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this qualitative study, we collected public tweets (n = 551,245) that contained a vaccine-related keyword and had been published between 9 December 2020 and 8 January 2021 through the Twitter API. A random sample of tweets (n = 1041) was selected and analyzed by four researchers with the content analysis method. We found that 90.5% of the tweets were about vaccines, 22.6% (n = 213) of the tweets mentioned at least one COVID-19 vaccine by name, and the most frequently mentioned COVID-19 vaccine was CoronaVac (51.2%). We found that 22.0% (n = 207) of the tweets included at least one anti-vaccination theme. Poor scientific processes (21.7%), conspiracy theories (16.4%), and suspicions towards manufacturers (15.5%) were the most frequently mentioned themes. The most co-occurring themes were “poor scientific process” with “suspicion towards manufacturers” (n = 9), and “suspicion towards health authorities” (n = 5). This study may be helpful for health managers, assisting them to identify the major concerns of the population and organize preventive measures through the significant role of social media in early spread of information about vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccination attitudes.
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spelling pubmed-88761632022-02-26 Vaccine Hesitancy and Anti-Vaccination Attitudes during the Start of COVID-19 Vaccination Program: A Content Analysis on Twitter Data Küçükali, Hüseyin Ataç, Ömer Palteki, Ayşe Seval Tokaç, Ayşe Zülal Hayran, Osman Vaccines (Basel) Article Twitter is a useful source for detecting anti-vaccine content due to the increasing prevalence of these arguments on social media. We aimed to identify the prominent themes about vaccine hesitancy and refusal on social media posts in Turkish during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this qualitative study, we collected public tweets (n = 551,245) that contained a vaccine-related keyword and had been published between 9 December 2020 and 8 January 2021 through the Twitter API. A random sample of tweets (n = 1041) was selected and analyzed by four researchers with the content analysis method. We found that 90.5% of the tweets were about vaccines, 22.6% (n = 213) of the tweets mentioned at least one COVID-19 vaccine by name, and the most frequently mentioned COVID-19 vaccine was CoronaVac (51.2%). We found that 22.0% (n = 207) of the tweets included at least one anti-vaccination theme. Poor scientific processes (21.7%), conspiracy theories (16.4%), and suspicions towards manufacturers (15.5%) were the most frequently mentioned themes. The most co-occurring themes were “poor scientific process” with “suspicion towards manufacturers” (n = 9), and “suspicion towards health authorities” (n = 5). This study may be helpful for health managers, assisting them to identify the major concerns of the population and organize preventive measures through the significant role of social media in early spread of information about vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccination attitudes. MDPI 2022-01-21 /pmc/articles/PMC8876163/ /pubmed/35214620 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vaccines10020161 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Küçükali, Hüseyin
Ataç, Ömer
Palteki, Ayşe Seval
Tokaç, Ayşe Zülal
Hayran, Osman
Vaccine Hesitancy and Anti-Vaccination Attitudes during the Start of COVID-19 Vaccination Program: A Content Analysis on Twitter Data
title Vaccine Hesitancy and Anti-Vaccination Attitudes during the Start of COVID-19 Vaccination Program: A Content Analysis on Twitter Data
title_full Vaccine Hesitancy and Anti-Vaccination Attitudes during the Start of COVID-19 Vaccination Program: A Content Analysis on Twitter Data
title_fullStr Vaccine Hesitancy and Anti-Vaccination Attitudes during the Start of COVID-19 Vaccination Program: A Content Analysis on Twitter Data
title_full_unstemmed Vaccine Hesitancy and Anti-Vaccination Attitudes during the Start of COVID-19 Vaccination Program: A Content Analysis on Twitter Data
title_short Vaccine Hesitancy and Anti-Vaccination Attitudes during the Start of COVID-19 Vaccination Program: A Content Analysis on Twitter Data
title_sort vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccination attitudes during the start of covid-19 vaccination program: a content analysis on twitter data
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8876163/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35214620
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vaccines10020161
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