Public Health Messages to Address Vaccine Hesitancy

Summary

Views on vaccines range from those who are strongly supportive to those who are stridently opposed and will not budge from identity-based core beliefs about vaccines. In between these poles are numerous others who can delay, be reluctant (but still accept), or refuse/accept some vaccines for their children but not others. It is for these vaccine-hesitant parents that constitute the 'middle ground' of this spectrum where the most immediate and productive gains can be made towards enhancing vaccination acceptance and improving uptake. However, navigating this noisy communications environment is difficult, given the array of confusing and conflicting information available from multiple and competing sources. To date, there is no consensus on how best to use communication to respond to vaccine hesitancy. Building on two Canada-wide surveys of parents, the goal of this research is to identify which communication strategies show the greatest impact in reducing parental vaccine hesitancy and improving vaccination intentions.

The specific objectives are to:

1. Develop and pre-test four variations of news media stories that vary by source (parent versus physician) and content (intuitive versus deliberative);
2. Examine the impact of vaccine hesitant parents' exposure to vaccine communications that vary in source (parent versus physician) and content (intuitive versus deliberative) on primary (vaccine hesitant attitudes) and secondary (vaccine intentions) outcomes; and
3. Explore which media story variation may be more effective in improving vaccination attitudes and intentions for different parental decision-making styles (deliberative versus intuitive).

Conditions

• Vaccine Hesitancy

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Parent source

Having a parent feature prominently in a news story

BEHAVIORAL

Doctor source

Having a doctor feature prominently in a news story

BEHAVIORAL

Deliberative content

News story content includes process of weighing the risks/benefits of vaccinating, the importance of vaccines for community protection, and concludes with a recommendation to vaccinate.

BEHAVIORAL

Intuitive content

News story content focuses on the consequences of not vaccinating (including vaccine preventable diseases) and the decisional regret.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Canadian Immunization Research Network

  collaborator NETWORK

• University of Manitoba

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Michelle Driedger, PhD · University of Manitoba

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2018-07-09

Primary Completion

2018-11-09

Completion

2018-11-09

Countries

• Canada

Study Locations