Impact of Framing on Intentions to Vaccinate Daughters against HPV: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

Cervical cancer incidence is marked by severe racial and ethnic disparities. Effective promotion of the recently licensed HPV vaccine across ethnic/racial groups may help curtail disparities. The purpose of this research was to investigate mothers’ intentions to vaccinate daughters against HPV as a function of message framing (gain versus loss) across three cultural groups: Hispanic, non-Hispanic White, and non-Hispanic African-American. One hundred fifty mothers were recruited from WIC clinics in Wisconsin and asked to respond to information about the HPV vaccine for their daughters. In a repeated-measures experiment, two different frames (gain and loss) were used to present the information. Consistent with our expectations, results indicated that both frames are equally effective in promoting vaccination intentions in non-Hispanic White Mothers. Conversely, a loss frame message was more effective in non-Hispanic African-American and Hispanic mothers. These results suggest that current information sharing campaigns, aimed at promoting the HPV vaccine among ethnic minority groups, should be modified to not focus exclusively on the benefits of vaccination.

Educational interventions to increase HPV vaccination acceptance: A systematic review

“…Four of the studies recruited parents exclusively [41,44,46,55], thirteen recruited college aged-participants [42,43,45,47–53,56–58], and one recruited a broad sample of adults from which we report the subgroup analysis involving parents with minor girls eligible to receive the HPV vaccine [54]. Three of the studies involving parent participants only included parents of girls [41,54,55] and two included parents of boys or girls [41,46]. Of the studies involving college-aged participants, seven included women only [43,45,48,49,51–53], three men only [42,47,50] and three included both men and women [56–58].…”

“…All four studies with Gerend as the lead author as well as a fifth conducted by Leader, et al were conducted prior to the licensure of the HPV vaccine for the study’s target population (namely males and females or males exclusively) [47–50,54]. The rest were conducted post-licensure [41–46,51–53,55–58]. Because the objective of all eighteen studies was to compare two or more framing messages, all included at least one comparison group although only four included a standard-treatment or no-treatment control condition [41,43,51,58].…”

“…In terms of format, the majority of the interventions in this category were presented as written materials either as 1–2 page brochures and fact sheets [41,44,47–50,52,53,55] or as online content [45,46,54,56–58]. One intervention involved slide presentations [42], another radio advertisements [43], and a third videos [51].…”

“…None of these found any main effects of gain versus loss framing on HPV vaccination intention [44–46,55]. However, some studies did find that gain/loss framing affected HPV vaccination intention under particular circumstances (as demonstrated by significant interactions with other variables including aspects of sexual history [48]; number of vaccinations required for immunity [49]; among persons primed with red versus gray color [50]; among persons characterized as present-versus future-minded [57]; and among persons characterized as avoidance- versus approach-oriented [48,56]).…”

Persuasive messaging for human papillomavirus vaccination by adolescent providers in a five-country multi-site study

“…Attitudes and beliefs from these clinicians highlight the difficulties associated with human papillomavirus vaccination uptake in some countries where anti-human papillomavirus vaccination campaigns prevail, despite numerous reports demonstrating the safety and high tolerability of human papillomavirus vaccination 33. This underlines the importance of developing cultural-, religious-, and ethnic-specific messages to enhance the uptake of human papillomavirus vaccination 34. For instance, one health provider mentioned that parents are often inundated by religious concerns and negative messages about human papillomavirus vaccination, making it more difficult to convince them to vaccinate their child against human papillomavirus.…”