Understanding change in COVID-19 vaccination intention with network analysis of longitudinal data from Dutch adults

Abstract

Prior research into the relationship between attitudes and vaccination intention is predominantly cross-sectional and therefore does not provide insight into directions of relations. During the COVID-19 vaccines development and enrollment phase, we studied the temporal dynamics of COVID-19 vaccination intention in relation to attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines and the pandemic, vaccination in general, social norms and trust. The data are derived from a longitudinal survey study with Dutch participants from a research panel (N = 744; six measurements between December 2020 and May 2021; age 18–84 years [M = 53.32]) and analyzed with vector-autoregression network analyses. While cross-sectional results indicated that vaccination intention was relatively strongly related to attitudes toward the vaccines, results from temporal analyses showed that vaccination intention mainly predicted other vaccination-related variables and to a lesser extent was predicted by variables. We found a weak predictive effect from social norm to vaccination intention that was not robust. This study underlines the challenge of stimulating uptake of new vaccines developed during pandemics, and the importance of examining directions of effects in research into vaccination intention.

How does the vaccine approval procedure affect COVID-19 vaccination intentions?

“…We consider studying how the approval procedure affects people's vaccination intentions at later stages of the vaccination rollout an interesting avenue for future research. Despite this, previous longitudinal studies indicate that vaccination intentions against COVID-19 remain stable over time ( Chambon et al, 2022 ; Gursoy et al, 2021 ; Szilagyi et al, 2021 ), emphasizing the importance of policies that promote vaccination readiness early on in the vaccination campaign. Our findings highlight the crucial role that the vaccine approval procedure plays at this critical early stage of the vaccination rollout.…”

COVID‐19 vaccine acceptance: A comparative longitudinal analysis of the association between risk perception, confidence, and the acceptance of a COVID‐19 vaccine

“…Substantively, it suggests that, while increasing people's awareness about COVID‐19 characteristics and fostering individuals’ confidence can be a relevant strategy to promote individuals’ vaccine acceptance, these predictors might not be the most relevant when seeking to increase countries’ average vaccination rates. Indeed, recent longitudinal studies showed that vaccination intentions tend to be stable over time and might be rather hard to change (Chambon et al., 2022). While refraining from offering specific policy suggestions, as proposed by IJzerman et al.…”

A tale of two cities: how a psychological network approach can improve our understanding of local residents’ risk perception of the process industries

“…The importance of insight into directions of effects applies to the entire risk perception network presented in this study, and to research into determinants of risk perception in general (Siegrist, 2021). A next step towards such insights could be to conduct longitudinal research and calculate temporal risk perceptions networks in the context of handling hazardous substances, which would provide insight into the dynamics of relations between variables and the stability of the risk perception network (e.g., Chambon et al, 2023;Chambon, Kammeraad, et al, 2022).…”

“…Furthermore, information about the strength and stability of an attitude and its impact on behavior can be obtained via the structure of an attitude network, such as the connectivity of the network (Dalege et al, 2019). The added value of the CAN model combined with additional variables such as trust and social norms, also known as broad attitude networks, has already been demonstrated in the (public) health domain (Chambon et al, 2023;Chambon, Dalege, Waldorp, et al, 2022;Chambon, Kammeraad, et al, 2022).…”