Motivating Seasonal Influenza Vaccination and Cross-Promoting COVID-19 Vaccination: An Audience Segmentation Study among University Students

Abstract

In the response to the coronavirus pandemic, much attention has been invested in promoting COVID-19 vaccination. However, the impact of seasonal influenza should not be neglected, particularly during the winter influenza surge. Currently, most influenza vaccination campaigns target at healthcare workers or high-risk population groups, while COVID-19 vaccination programmes are targeting the whole population as a single homogeneous group. There is limited research on the promotion of influenza vaccination for university students who study, live, and socialise in close contact with a large variety of people on campus, resulting in a low vaccination rate among this underserved group. Thus, a vaccination programme tailored for university students should be developed to increase protection against influenza-like illnesses and complications, and to help achieve herd immunity across populations who spread viruses. WHO has advocated the potential value of social marketing in vaccination campaigns and highlighted the need for audience segmentation as a major prerequisite component of intervention design. This study aims to identify distinct and homogeneous groups of university students based on sociodemographic, psychographic, and behavioural attributes to inform interventions. Two-step cluster analysis was applied in a sample size of 530 university students and revealed four segments that demonstrate statistically significant differences in their attitudes, behaviours, intentions, and responses to promotion messages about seasonal influenza and COVID-19 vaccination. The findings provide a detailed understanding of segment characteristics among university students that can be applied to develop an effective social marketing campaign that can motivate influenza vaccination and cross-promote uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine.

The Attitude towards Vaccination of Health Sciences Students at a Spanish University Improved over the First 18 Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The good-and later, further improved-attitude towards vaccination seen in the present work is important since many studies concur that such attitudes improve the likelihood of requesting the influenza [54][55][56][57] and COVID-19 vaccines [43,48,58].…”

Increasing Seasonal Influenza Vaccination among University Students: A Systematic Review of Programs Using a Social Marketing Perspective

“…In a study [ 45 ] where participants received multiple in-app messages throughout the program period, the majority of participants responded to the vaccination messages and were activated immediately after receiving the first message. This phenomenon matches with important findings from a segmentation study conducted by Lee et al [ 66 ] that students with strong vaccine hesitancy will not respond to the same message no matter how times they are exposed to it. Direct repeats of the same message will only work for certain types of students.…”

“…Although healthcare and non-healthcare students have documented differences in the reasons behind influenza vaccine acceptance [ 13 , 65 ], interventions based on group difference within the student population were not reported. According to an advanced multivariate segmentation analysis conducted by Lee et al [ 66 ], university students should be segmented. The Lee et al [ 52 ] study identified four heterogenous groups with observed differences in receptivity of influenza information and vaccine acceptance.…”

“…The Lee et al [ 52 ] study identified four heterogenous groups with observed differences in receptivity of influenza information and vaccine acceptance. The Lee et al [ 66 ] study identified that at least half of the students have strong vaccine hesitancy and vaccination behavior cannot be influenced simply by provision of education, peer-influence, or incentives. To date, no studies have assessed tailored intervention programs developed based on segment differences in vaccine acceptance or information receptivity.…”

“…Education, as proposed in many health promotion studies, was found to have no effect on increasing vaccination rates [ 20 ]. As per the segment characteristics identified in the study of Lee et al [ 66 ], university students who have strong vaccine hesitancy will not be influenced by the provision of information and education and students who have strong vaccine acceptance do not need to be educated for action. Moreover, for those who are receptive to influenza vaccination, positive influence by parents, peer, and healthcare center staff would be influential to vaccine uptake.…”