New Technion study identifies factors used when trusting vaccine info
The World Health Organization considers vaccine hesitancy – the reluctance or outright refusal to use vaccines despite how readily available they are – as one of the top 10 global health threats.
By AARON REICHDoctor giving a vaccine to a patient (illustrative)(photo credit: INGIMAGE)
A new study from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology sheds light on different values of trustworthiness regarding vaccine information online between vaccine-confident and vaccine-hesitant individuals.The study, titled "Vaccine information seeking on social Q&A services," was authored by Prof. Ayelet Baram-Tsabari and Dr. Aviv J. Sharon of Technion's Faculty of Education in Science and Technology, alongside visiting researcher Dr. Elad Yom-Tov of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, and was published in the March 10, 2020 issue of the journal Vaccine.The World Health Organization considers vaccine hesitancy – which is the reluctance or outright refusal to use vaccines despite how readily available they are – as one of the top 10 global health threats. This has led to numerous crises of diseases becoming more widespread, such as the recent measles outbreak in the US and Israel, for which their are vaccines.Many experts believe this is worsened by how widespread anti-vaccine content is online, fueling many myths such as how vaccines supposedly cause autism. This study, however, is one of the first to attempt to ascertain how individuals look for information about vaccines online, as well as how they decide which information is trustworthy.“Vaccine hesitancy is a catch-all category for several different styles of decision-making about vaccines. Our study shows some ways in which vaccine hesitancy can be manifested in online behavior,” said Sharon.The findings were gathered from an experiment where 694 participants from the US were told to evaluate vaccine information from online Q&A platforms such as Yahoo! Answers. Each of the 600 answers viewed were given a rating by the participants based on how trustworthy they were perceived.While both vaccine-hesitant and vaccine-confident participants viewed answers from health professionals as being more trustworthy than answers from parents – who in turn were considered more trustworthy than answers from people without any listed expertise or parent-status – vaccine-hesitant participants tended to place more value in text length. This suggests a preference for longer, more detailed answers as opposed to shorter ones.These findings indicate that there is a great deal of public trust in mainstream scientific and medical discourse despite the widespread presence of anti-vaccine content online. This could suggest that increasing outreach by experts online could be a means to address vaccine hesitancy.
