About This Project

Increasingly, parents are reluctant to allow their young children to receive vaccines, leading to disease outbreaks. There is little understanding of what information helps parents become accepting of vaccine after initial hesitation. We propose an online, crowd-sourced, focus group study of parents who were once vaccine-hesitant but later decided to vaccinate to help us understand the type and content of information that causes this change in vaccination beliefs.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Over the last decade there has been a significant increase in the U.S. in outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases like measles, pertussis and mumps. The major cause of these outbreaks is under-vaccination among young children. Most cases of under vaccination are due to parents' reluctance to allow their child to receive vaccines according to the recommended national vaccine schedule. There is an abundance of research on why parents are vaccine-hesitant. In contrast, there is essentially no research that explores the decision-making and thought processes among parents who were initially vaccine-hesitant, but ultimately decided to follow the recommended vaccination schedule.

What is the significance of this project?

There is an immediate and pressing need for interventions to address the growing public health threat of parental vaccine hesitancy. Most of the prior interventions that have been developed stem from academicians' ideas of what might work, based on their own experience, and on behavioral theories. Unfortunately, the majority of these interventions have failed to show an impact. New approaches are needed. One avenue that has not been examined is talking to actual parents who started out as vaccine-hesitant, but ultimately became vaccine-accepting. Our hypothesis is that by understanding these parents' thought processes and decision-making, better interventions to address vaccine hesitancy can be developed.

What are the goals of the project?

The goal of this project is to systematically examine the decision-making of parents who changed from vaccine-hesitant to vaccine-accepting in order to identify potential target approaches for future intervention studies. We will convene 3-4 "virtual" focus groups of parents of children younger than 2 years who made this conversion. Parents will be identified through the crowdsourcing forum mTurk which we have used successfully for past projects. Using a written focus group guide, parents will be systematically asked about the evolution of their vaccination view with emphasis on the type of information that led to vaccine acceptance. Grounded theory methods will be used to analyze the data.