The Credibility of Health Information Sources as Predictors of Attitudes toward Vaccination-The Results from a Longitudinal Study in Poland.

Jozef Maciuszek,Dariusz Dolinski,Katarzyna Stasiuk,Mateusz Polak

doi:10.3390/vaccines9080933

Abstract

Background: The research focused on the relationships between attitudes towards vaccination and the trust placed in different sources of information (science, experts and the information available on the Internet) before and during COVID-19. Method: A longitudinal design was applied with the first measurement in February 2018 (N = 1039). The second measurement (N = 400) was carried out in December 2020 to test if the pandemic influenced the trust in different sources of information. Results: The final analyses carried out on final sample of 400 participants showed that there has been no change in trust in the Internet as a source of knowledge about health during the pandemic. However, the trust in science, physicians, subjective health knowledge, as well as the attitude towards the vaccination has declined. Regression analysis also showed that changes in the level of trust in physicians and science were associated with analogous (in the same direction) changes in attitudes toward vaccination. The study was also focused on the trust in different sources of health knowledge as possible predictors of willingness to be vaccinated against SARS-nCoV-2. However, it appeared that the selected predictors explained a small part of the variance. This suggests that attitudes toward the new COVID vaccines may have different sources than attitudes toward vaccines that have been known to the public for a long time.

Highlights

Published: 23 August 2021Despite overwhelming medical evidence and the unanimous position of medical professionals in favor of vaccination, the number of people skeptical about vaccination has grown in many countries in recent years
This issue has become relevant at this time, when the world is struggling to cope with the problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which, according to many experts, can only be contained through mass vaccination
The results revealed that mean scores for trust in physicians, trust in science, subjective knowledge and attitudes toward vaccination significantly decreased across the two time points, showing a significant time effect for these factors (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Published: 23 August 2021Despite overwhelming medical evidence and the unanimous position of medical professionals in favor of vaccination, the number of people skeptical about vaccination has grown in many countries in recent years. We approached the problem of attitudes toward vaccination not from the perspective of personality traits, but by treating it as a manifestation of the broader problem of trust in science and experts’ opinions [4,5,6]. We took into account that faced with the pandemic, laypeople may have changed their levels of trust in various sources of health knowledge [7] This in turn might have influenced their attitude toward vaccination, including toward the Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations

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