Policymakers who want to encourage uptake of Covid vaccines should focus on communicating the risks of not having such jabs, research suggests.
Researchers in China say they found that the approach, known as a loss-framing strategy, is more persuasive in boosting people’s willingness to be vaccinated than focusing on the benefits to the individual themselves or to others.
This, the team says, may be because focusing on gains tends to be beneficial when people think a certain behavior is safe.
“Vaccines can be considered risky, given their potential side effects, despite their preventive properties,” they write. “Therefore, the loss framing strategy has advantages over gain framing in promoting vaccination.”
Write in the Journal of Public Healthreport the researchers how they randomly divided 1,085 participants into four groups of similar size. Participants were all 18 or older and had not yet received all their Covid steps.
All participants received information about the incidence and death rate of Covid. Although one group was given no further information, the other received extra messages, either explaining the individual benefits of vaccination, the benefits to others, or the risks of not being vaccinated.
The participants were asked to rate on a five-point scale whether they think vaccination is effective in preventing people from contracting Covid, and their willingness to be vaccinated, also on a five-point scale.
The results revealed that a greater perception of vaccination effectiveness was associated with a greater willingness to be vaccinated. The team also found that groups that received additional messages were more willing to be vaccinated than the group that did not vaccinate.
However, the greatest willingness was seen among the participants who were told about the possible adverse effects of not getting a Covid jab, such as being more likely to develop severe Covid symptoms. Indeed, compared to the group that received no extra messages, participants in this group were 2.79 times more willing to be vaccinated.
A further analysis suggested that the three types of additional messages may promote the positive association between perceived vaccine efficacy and willingness to be vaccinated.
Dr Simon Williams, a behavioral scientist and public health researcher at Swansea University, said the results agreed with other studies showing that the perceived effectiveness of a vaccine influenced how willing people were to take it. He said this is very relevant to Covid vaccines, as many countries face challenges in communicating that boosters are still effective and important for certain groups.
But, he said, while the new work suggested framing vaccine messages in terms of what you stand to lose by not getting vaccinated was more effective than framing them in terms of potential gains, it wasn’t clear whether the same results would not be found in others. countries. Some research has come to different conclusions.
“A number of studies have found that loss messages tend to outperform disease ‘detection’ messages, such as ‘get screened’ for catching disease early,” he said. “While ‘win’ messages work better for prevention behaviors, such as ‘get vaccinated’ or ‘eat healthy’ to avoid disease.”
