Should I Get That Jab? Exploring Influence to Encourage Vaccination via Online Social Media

This paper explores the suitability of social media networks (SMNs) as a means of influencing the public’s decision-making process regarding vaccinations, specifically a vaccination to protect girls against HPV, a virus associated with cervical cancer. Parents of girls in the target cohort were invited to online discussion forums where they could discuss their opinions on the vaccination. We varied the posts on the forums in different experimental condition, such that they were exposed to promotion of the vaccination in one of four different ways, and coming from one of two different sources, i.e., peers or government health representatives. Following the health belief model (HBM), these messages served as cues to action. After their active participation on the forums, participants filled out a ques-tionnaire with items related to the HBM. Analyses revealed no effect of our experimental manipula-tions of the cue to action. However, using an exploratory novel network analysis approach, we find that the HBM does not adequately account for influence via SMNs. Specifically we show that vaccina-tion decisions are not taken in social isolation, a fact thus far ignored by various forms of the HBM. Implications for studies assessing the use of online channels for health communication are discussed.

[1]  M. Pourahmadi.  Covariance Estimation: The GLM and Regularization Perspectives , 2011, 1202.1661.

[2]  C. Betsch,et al.  Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde? (How) the Internet influences vaccination decisions: recent evidence and tentative guidelines for online vaccine communication. , 2012, Vaccine.

[3]  Elizabeth R Unger,et al.  Prevalence of HPV infection among females in the United States. , 2007, JAMA.

[4]  G. Eysenbach,et al.  Social Media: A Review and Tutorial of Applications in Medicine and Health Care , 2014, Journal of medical Internet research.

[5]  S. Franceschi,et al.  Worldwide distribution of human papillomavirus types in cytologically normal women in the International Agency for Research on Cancer HPV prevalence surveys: a pooled analysis , 2005, The Lancet.

[6]  M. Becker,et al.  The Health Belief Model: A Decade Later , 1984, Health education quarterly.

[7]  C J L M Meijer,et al.  The causal relation between human papillomavirus and cervical cancer. , 2002, Journal of clinical pathology.

[8]  D. Borsboom,et al.  State of the aRt personality research: A tutorial on network analysis of personality data in R , 2015 .

[9]  Daniel G. Goldstein,et al.  Beyond nudges: Tools of a choice architecture , 2012 .

[10]  Jiahua Chen,et al.  Extended Bayesian information criteria for model selection with large model spaces , 2008 .

[11]  W. Otten,et al.  Determinants of HPV vaccination intentions among Dutch girls and their mothers: a cross-sectional study , 2013, BMC Public Health.

[12]  Margarete Boos,et al.  Attitude Change in Computer-Mediated Communication: Effects of Anonymity and Category Norms , 2003 .

[13]  R. G. Fichman,et al.  Editorial Overview---The Role of Information Systems in Healthcare: Current Research and Future Trends , 2011 .

[14]  J. Leask,et al.  Lessons from an online debate about measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) immunization. , 2012, Vaccine.

[15]  Marcel Salathé,et al.  Complex social contagion makes networks more vulnerable to disease outbreaks , 2012, Scientific Reports.

[16]  Chanthika Pornpitakpan.  The Persuasiveness of Source Credibility: A Critical Review of Five Decades' Evidence , 2004 .

[17]  I. Rosenstock.  Historical Origins of the Health Belief Model , 1974 .

[18]  A. Kata.  Anti-vaccine activists, Web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm--an overview of tactics and tropes used online by the anti-vaccination movement. , 2012, Vaccine.

[19]  R. M. Wolfe,et al.  Vaccine Criticism on the World Wide Web , 2005, Journal of medical Internet research.

[20]  Verena D. Schmittmann,et al.  Qgraph: Network visualizations of relationships in psychometric data , 2012 .

[21]  Sabine Matook,et al.  Forming an intention to act on recommendations given via online social networks , 2015, Eur. J. Inf. Syst..

[22]  J. Friedman,et al.  New Insights and Faster Computations for the Graphical Lasso , 2011 .

[23]  D. Langley,et al.  Patterns of Herding and their Occurrence in an Online Setting , 2014 .

[24]  D. Watts,et al.  Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation , 2007 .

[25]  R. Tibshirani,et al.  Sparse inverse covariance estimation with the graphical lasso. , 2008, Biostatistics.

[26]  Eiko I. Fried,et al.  Bereavement and Depressive Symptoms 2 From Loss to Loneliness : The Relationship Between Bereavement and Depressive Symptoms , 2015 .

[27]  Xiaoli Nan,et al.  HPV Vaccine Information in the Blogosphere: How Positive and Negative Blogs Influence Vaccine-Related Risk Perceptions, Attitudes, and Behavioral Intentions , 2012, Health communication.

[28]  Evimaria Terzi,et al.  Peer and Authority Pressure in Information-Propagation Models , 2011, ECML/PKDD.

[29]  E. S. Knowles,et al.  Approach-Avoidance Model of Persuasion: Alpha and Omega Strategies for Change , 2004 .

[30]  Larry A. Wasserman,et al.  The huge Package for High-dimensional Undirected Graph Estimation in R , 2012, J. Mach. Learn. Res..

[31]  A. Kaplan,et al.  Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media , 2010 .

[32]  Cheol Park,et al.  Information direction, website reputation and eWOM effect: A moderating role of product type , 2009 .

[33]  R. Tibshirani.  Regression Shrinkage and Selection via the Lasso , 1996 .

[34]  Stefan Stieglitz,et al.  Emotions and Information Diffusion in Social Media—Sentiment of Microblogs and Sharing Behavior , 2013, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[35]  Denny Borsboom,et al.  Mental Disorders as Causal Systems , 2015 .

[36]  Claudia D. van Borkulo,et al.  A new method for constructing networks from binary data , 2014, Scientific Reports.

[37]  Yong Tan,et al.  Feeling Blue? Go Online: An Empirical Study of Social Support among Patients , 2010, Inf. Syst. Res..

[38]  K. Wilson,et al.  An analysis of the Human Papilloma Virus vaccine debate on MySpace blogs. , 2010, Vaccine.

[39]  Michael I. Jordan.  Graphical Models , 2003 .

[40]  Noah J. Goldstein,et al.  Social influence: compliance and conformity. , 2004, Annual review of psychology.

[41]  Christopher J. Carpenter,et al.  A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Health Belief Model Variables in Predicting Behavior , 2010, Health communication.

[42]  Francis Tuerlinckx,et al.  From loss to loneliness: The relationship between bereavement and depressive symptoms. , 2015, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[43]  Larry A. Wasserman,et al.  The Nonparanormal: Semiparametric Estimation of High Dimensional Undirected Graphs , 2009, J. Mach. Learn. Res..