Exploring Vaccine Hesitancy Through an Artist–Scientist Collaboration

Abstract

This project explores vaccine hesitancy through an artist-scientist collaboration. It aims to create better understanding of vaccine hesitant parents' health beliefs and how these influence their vaccine-critical decisions. The project interviews vaccine-hesitant parents in the Netherlands and Finland and develops experimental visual-narrative means to analyse the interview data. Vaccine-hesitant parents' health beliefs are, in this study, expressed through stories, and they are paralleled with so-called illness narratives. The study explores the following four main health beliefs originating from the parents' interviews: (1) perceived benefits of illness, (2) belief in the body's intelligence and self-healing capacity, (3) beliefs about the "inside-outside" flow of substances in the body, and (4) view of death as a natural part of life. These beliefs are interpreted through arts-based diagrammatic representations. These diagrams, merging multiple aspects of the parents' narratives, are subsequently used in a collaborative meaning-making dialogue between the artist and the scientist. The resulting dialogue contrasts the health beliefs behind vaccine hesitancy with scientific knowledge, as well as the authors' personal, and differing, attitudes toward these.

Simulated Encounters With Vaccine-Hesitant Parents: Arts-Based Video Scenario and a Writing Exercise

“… 26 The video case introduces actual parents’ stories that demonstrate such umbrella categories, some of them being identified in the previous phase of this study only. 27 The specificities of the parents’ lives are here considered important in demonstrating the ‘realness’ of the phenomenon and in motivating the students. Thus, while many video cases exclude the patient’s everyday life and its psychosocial aspects, focusing on medical interviews in the examination room only, 28 this video gives voice to the parent’s lifeworld 29 and opens the door visually to their homes and everyday activities.…”

Suomalaisten suhde rokotuksiin – mitä tuoreet kyselytutkimukset kertovat

“…Suoma laisten rokotusasenteita on alettu tutkia tarkem min vasta aivan viime vuosina (ks. 6,7,8,9,10).…”

Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Vaccine Hesitancy: Developing Trust and Shifting Stereotypes

“…In 2015 and 2016, Kaisu conducted open-ended interviews with nine vaccine-critical parents to explore health beliefs that background the parents' immunization decisions. The health beliefs were interpreted in diagrammatic visualizations, and paralleled with scientific views by discussing them with Johan [1]. By gaining an understanding of the parents' beliefs and behaviours, visiting their homes and meeting their children and mirroring these experiences with her existing reservations about vaccines, Kaisu was able to represent the parents' voices during the collaborative dialogue with Johan.…”