Title : Combatting vaccine hesitancy with a brief educational intervention: A randomized controlled trial
Abstract:
Background: Vaccine hesitancy is one of the principal causes behind decreasing vaccination rates in the United States. Many factors can contribute to vaccine hesitancy, including misinformation, lack of trust in institutions, cultural or religious beliefs, personal experience, and social pressures. Public health practitioners have proposed educational campaigns, healthcare provider communications training, motivational interviewing, and other interventions to increase vaccine uptake, with varying degrees of success.
Objectives: We aim to evaluate the effectiveness of a brief educational intervention in lowering vaccine hesitancy. Design: An online, randomized controlled trial survey with 1,015 respondents.
Methods: The survey included a control and three experimental arms; the baseline survey was administered as the control. The experimental arms included the baseline survey plus one of three brief educational interventions. Results: Descriptive analysis revealed that each of the interventions resulted in lower VHCS (vaccine hesitancy composite score) amongst respondents with lower educational attainment (“technical training certificate” and “high school diploma or GED”). Conversely, the VHCS of liberal respondents with higher educational attainment increased with all three interventions. Further analysis showed the annotated list of vaccine years of approval resulted in lower vaccine hesitancy scores when accounting for political affiliation and educational level. This study illustrates that interventions may be effective in specific subpopulations and have the opposite effect in others and supports highly targeted audience segmentation method as a best practice when developing protocols to lower vaccine hesitancy.
