Abstract
In general, health communication messages intend to change individuals’ behaviors, applying both cognitive reasoning and increasingly personal accounts to achieve these changes. Nonetheless, against the background of increasing skepticism towards scientific findings and patronizing message claims, health messages fail to achieve their intended results. By use of a quantitative survey with Austrian respondents (n = 271), the study at hand intends to uncover individuals’ level of skepticism towards Tick-Borne Encephalitis (TBE) as well as their evaluations of online vaccination-related information on TBE. Moreover, as skepticism is likely to lead individuals to reject health message content altogether, we also test for the relationship between skepticism and reactance. Results indicate that there is only a marginal relationship between the two variables in the TBE communication context. For this reason, other variables might have to be included in future research to derive more comprehensive results and recommendations. Since skepticism has proven to be of lesser importance in TBE message reception, government or health officials are recommended to prioritize additional constructs, such as trust, which can be elevated through more affective communication.
Highlights
In recent years, the topic of vaccination has received a lot of public exposure
This study aims to analyze the relationship between skepticism and reactance in the context of online health messages on Tick-Borne Encephalitis (TBE)
While our explorative study was innovative in examining a research area that is not yet at the center of scientific attention, there are several limitations to our study
Summary
The topic of vaccination has received a lot of public exposure. Thereby, news coverage and public debates have shown that people discuss vaccination and even refuse to vaccinate themselves or their children (Schoeppe et al, 2017). The growing refusal of e.g., measles vaccination led to the discussion that some vaccines should be mandatory instead of voluntary (Gesser-Edelsburg et al, 2015), and it often originated out of cost-benefit analysis to reduce the burden on costridden healthcare systems (Chang et al, 2018). Against this background, a growing need for information on vaccines seems to be necessary (Kessler and Zillich, 2019), which can influence vaccine demand and acceptance and people’s attitudes towards vaccination and willingness to vaccinate (Betsch et al, 2017). As online media has been found to influence individuals’ perceptions of vaccination (Betsch et al, 2017), the false information encountered might reduce their willingness to vaccinate
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