Cromar, Zachary J.; Findlay, Matthew; Turner, Elizabeth; Mills, Ammon (Utah Valley University)
Faculty Advisor: Gazdik-Stofer, Michaela (College of Science - Utah Valley University, Biology); Sylvester, Steven (College of Humanities and Social Sciences - Utah Valley University, Political Science)
The World Health Organization has included vaccine hesitancy in the top ten threats to global health in 2019. Studies done in the United States have shown that the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) can be used to identify why individuals are more vaccine-hesitant (VH) than others. Counterintuitively, the dichotomous moral foundations (MF) of care vs. harm, traditionally used in pro-vaccine messaging interventions, or fairness vs. cheating, were not found to be the foundations on which VH parents based their decision not to follow the CDC recommended vaccination schedule. It was discovered that the purity vs. degradation and liberty vs. oppression foundations are more important to VH individuals than all other foundations. Highly VH individuals are twice as likely to emphasize purity and liberty. Concerningly, in 2018, Utah ranked in the bottom ten states for child vaccination rates in 11 of the 19 vaccines reported by the Utah Department of Health. We plan on testing a broader messaging intervention than the current, traditional vaccine messages. Our messaging interventions will emphasize the MFs of liberty vs. oppression and purity vs. degradation to see if they will be more effective than our more traditional messaging intervention emphasizing care vs. harm, or an unrelated control message not related to vaccines. We hypothesize that messages emphasizing the purity and liberty foundations will resonate better with the VH and decrease their vaccine-hesitancy relative to the other groups. If our data supports that the MFs of liberty vs. oppression and purity vs. degradation significantly decrease vaccine-hesitancy than current general vaccine education messaging interventions should be broadened to include these MFs. However, if results do not demonstrate that the liberty vs. oppression MFs are more effective at decreasing vaccine hesitancy, then more research should be performed on the subject.