Individual Factors Influencing the Public’s Perceptions About the Importance of COVID-19 Immunity Certificates in the United Kingdom: Cross-sectional Web-based Questionnaire Survey

  1. Corina-Elena Niculaescu
  2. Isabel Karen Sassoon
  3. Irma Cecilia Landa-Avila
  4. Ozlem Colak
  5. Gyuchan Thomas Jun
  6. Panagiotis Balatsoukas

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Abstract

Understanding how perceptions around immunity certificates are influenced by individual characteristics is important to inform evidence-based policy making and implementation strategies for services around immunity and vaccine certification.

Objective

This study aimed to assess what were the main individual factors influencing people’s perception of the importance of using COVID-19 immunity certificates, including health beliefs about COVID-19, vaccination views, sociodemographics, and lifestyle factors.

Methods

A cross-sectional web-based survey with a nationally representative sample in the United Kingdom was conducted on August 3, 2021. Responses were collected and analyzed from 534 participants, aged 18 years and older, who were residents of the United Kingdom. The primary outcome measure (dependent variable) was the participants’ perceived importance of using immunity certificates, computed as an index of 6 items. The following individual drivers were used as the independent variables: (1) personal beliefs about COVID-19 (using constructs adapted from the Health Belief Model), (2) personal views on vaccination, (3) willingness to share immunity status with service providers, and (4) variables related to respondents’ lifestyle and sociodemographic characteristics.

Results

The perceived importance of immunity certificates was higher among respondents who felt that contracting COVID-19 would have a severe negative impact on their health (β=0.2564; P<.001) and felt safer if vaccinated (β=0.1552; P<.001). The prospect of future economic recovery positively influenced the perceived importance of immunity certificates. Respondents who were employed or self-employed (β=–0.2412; P=.001) or experienced an increase in income after the COVID-19 pandemic (β=–0.1287; P=.002) perceived the use of immunity certificates as less important compared to those who were unemployed or had retired or those who had experienced a reduction in their income during the pandemic.

Conclusions

The findings of our survey suggest that more vulnerable members in our society (those unemployed or retired and those who believe that COVID-19 would have a severe impact on their health) and people who experienced a reduction in income during the pandemic perceived the severity of not using immunity certificates in their daily life as higher.

Article activity feed

  1. Version published to 10.2196/37139
  2. Version published to 10.2196/preprints.37139
  3. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.12.21266256: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Ethicsnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power AnalysisPower calculation: The sample size was chosen pragmatically based on several different approaches[39], obtaining a minimum sample size between 271 and 1,067 participants, depending on the assumptions.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Limitations: One of the limitations of our study is that participants were recruited from the online survey platform Prolific. Since Prolific surveys are completed digitally (mobile, PC, tablet etc.) our sample was comprised of people who had the means and capacity to use digital technologies. Another limitation of our study is the relatively low explanatory power of our model with and adjusted R-squared of 22.76%, suggesting that the independent variables chosen by our stepwise linear regression model only explain 22.76% of the observed variation in the index Certificate Severity. Considering that research on immunity certificates is still in its early stages, we do not yet have a large body of literature to draw from in order to identify more predictors of Certificate Severity. More research is needed to explore what the factors that we do not capture could be.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  4. Version published to 10.1101/2021.11.12.21266256v1 on medRxiv