Effects of Facebook Comments on Attitude Toward Vaccines: The Roles of Perceived Distributions of Public Opinion and Perceived Vaccine Efficacy

Kim, Hanyoung; Han, Jeong Yeob; Seo, Youngji

doi:10.1080/10810730.2020.1723039

Cited by 37 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 49 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Few research studies have investigated HPV vaccination promotions by local organizations and groups on social media, and even less is known about the dynamics of how social media users respond to different kinds of promotional messages. Recent research has shown that user reactions and comments are likely to deviate from the purposes of the original messages, and their different opinions can influence the opinions of other viewers toward vaccines ( 23 ). Thus, it is important to examine the distributions of user engagements to targeted public vaccine promotion messages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Promotions and Hesitancy in Northern California Through Examining Public Facebook Pages and Groups

Zhang

Xue

Calabrese

et al. 2021

Front. Digit. Health

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination coverage among adolescents is lower in rural regions and remains under the 80% coverage goal by Healthy People 2030. Through both sentiment analysis and topic modeling, this research examines how local health agencies and groups in nine Northern California counties promote HPV vaccines through Facebook and how target populations react to promotion posts in comments that elucidate their sentiments and hesitancy toward HPV vaccination. In January 2021, we identified 2,105 public Facebook pages and 1,065 groups related to health within the counties and collected a total of 212 posts and 505 comments related to the HPV vaccine. The posts were published between 2010 and 2021, with the majority (83%) published after 2017. There were large variations of Facebook activities across counties. We categorized four counties with HPV vaccination initiation rates below 40% as low-coverage counties and five counties with rates above 40% as high-coverage counties. In general, low-coverage counties had fewer Facebook activities in comparison to high coverage. Results showed that, on average, comments about the HPV vaccine exhibited more positive emotion, more negative emotion, and more anger than the posts. Overall, thematic topics that emerged from posts centered around awareness and screening of HPV and cervical cancer, STI testing services, information sources, and calls to action for health services. However, comment topics did not correspond to posts and were mostly related to vaccine hesitancy, discussing vaccine risks, safety concerns, and distrust in vaccine science, citing misinformation. When comparing high- versus low-coverage counties, posts expressed similar sentiments; however, comments within high-coverage counties expressed more anger than in low-coverage counties. Comments from both high- and low-coverage counties expressed concerns with vaccine safety, risks, and injury. It is important to note that commenters exchanged information sources and tried to address misinformation themselves. Our results suggest that the promotion of HPV vaccines from public Facebook pages and groups is limited in frequency and content diversity. This illustrates problems with generalized social media vaccination promotion without community tailoring and addressing specific hesitancy concerns. Public health agencies should listen to the thoughts of targeted audiences reflected through comments and design relevant messages to address these concerns for HPV vaccination promotion.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Promotions and Hesitancy in Northern California Through Examining Public Facebook Pages and Groups

Zhang

Xue

Calabrese

et al. 2021

Front. Digit. Health

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Meanwhile, the development and testing of COVID-19 vaccines has drawn great attention and response on social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit that allow fast sharing of health information (Scanfeld, Scanfeld, and Larson 2010) and are found to play a major role in disseminating information about vaccinations (Stahl et al 2016; Dunn et al 2017). Public attitudes towards the vaccines, therefore, can be reflected by analyzing comments and posts in social media (Kim, Han, and Seo 2020; Tomeny, Vargo, and El-Toukhy 2017).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Media Study of Public Opinions on Potential COVID-19 Vaccines: Informing Dissent, Disparities, and Dissemination

Lyu

Wang

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The current development of vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 is unprecedented. Little is known, however, about the nuanced public opinions on the coming vaccines. We adopt a human-guided machine learning framework (using more than 40,000 rigorously selected tweets from more than 20,000 distinct Twitter users) to capture public opinions on the potential vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, classifying them into three groups: pro-vaccine, vaccine-hesitant, and anti-vaccine. We aggregate opinions at the state and country levels, and find that the major changes in the percentages of different opinion groups roughly correspond to the major pandemic-related events. Interestingly, the percentage of the pro-vaccine group is lower in the Southeast part of the United States. Using multinomial logistic regression, we compare demographics, social capital, income, religious status, political affiliations, geo-locations, sentiment of personal pandemic experience and non-pandemic experience, and county-level pandemic severity perception of these three groups to investigate the scope and causes of public opinions on vaccines. We find that socioeconomically disadvantaged groups are more likely to hold polarized opinions on potential COVID-19 vaccines. The anti-vaccine opinion is the strongest among the people who have the worst personal pandemic experience. Next, by conducting counterfactual analyses, we find that the U.S. public is most concerned about the safety, effectiveness, and political issues regarding potential vaccines for COVID-19, and improving personal pandemic experience increases the vaccine acceptance level. We believe this is the first large-scale social media-based study to analyze public opinions on potential COVID-19 vaccines that can inform more effective vaccine distribution policies and strategies.

show abstract

“…Online communities combine the credibility of interpersonal persuasion with the mass media's large audiences. To engage in online communities potentially results in effects on knowledge, attitudes, or behaviours among a large group of people like parents seeking for advice about vaccine-related decision-making (Kim et al, 2020;Teoh, 2019). Parents are an especially relevant population, because they are the main decision-makers for (or against) childhood vaccinations (Dworkin et al, 2013;Harmsen et al, 2013;Limaye & Salmon, 2017).…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vaccine-related Discussions in Online Communities for Parents. A Quantitative Overview

Bachl¹,

Link²

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Vaccinations are a medical success story. However, many individuals still experience doubts, which challenge vaccine compliance. Online communities for parents are important Internet sources for the critical exchange about vaccination. They serve as social support platforms, where parents provide informational, emotional, esteem and instrumental support to each other. We aimed to provide a structured overview of vaccine-related online discussions of parents. The content of the four most popular German online communities for parents (2012-2019) was obtained with web scraping. Structural topic models were used to characterize the exchanges about vaccination in 98,505 discussion posts. We identified 27 aspects of the vaccination discussions, which were sorted into four general perspectives. The general vaccination debate perspective (6 aspects, 24% of all content) covered societal and public health debates. The specific vaccinations perspective (8 aspects, 16%) addressed vaccinations against specific diseases. Parents discussed various vaccine-related practical issues (7 aspects, 20%). The relationship and communication perspective (6 aspects, 19%) collected aspects concerned with community building. The findings highlighted the diversity of vaccine-related online discussions, ranging from general public health debates to specific and practical questions. Investigating online exchanges can inform public health communicators about parental needs, misinformation, concerns, and interests.

show abstract

Effects of Facebook Comments on Attitude Toward Vaccines: The Roles of Perceived Distributions of Public Opinion and Perceived Vaccine Efficacy

Cited by 37 publications

References 49 publications

Understanding Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Promotions and Hesitancy in Northern California Through Examining Public Facebook Pages and Groups

Understanding Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Promotions and Hesitancy in Northern California Through Examining Public Facebook Pages and Groups

Social Media Study of Public Opinions on Potential COVID-19 Vaccines: Informing Dissent, Disparities, and Dissemination

Vaccine-related Discussions in Online Communities for Parents. A Quantitative Overview

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About