Psychosocial Predictors of COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake among Pregnant Women: A Cross-Sectional Study in Greece

  1. Petros Galanis
  2. Irene Vraka
  3. Aglaia Katsiroumpa
  4. Olga Siskou
  5. Olympia Konstantakopoulou
  6. Eleftheria Zogaki
  7. Daphne Kaitelidou

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Abstract

An understanding of the factors associated with the COVID-19 vaccine uptake in pregnant women is paramount to persuade women to get vaccinated against COVID-19. We estimated the vaccination rate of pregnant women against COVID-19 and evaluated psychosocial factors associated with vaccine uptake among them. We conducted a cross-sectional study with a convenience sample. In particular, we investigated socio-demographic data of pregnant women (e.g., age, marital status, and educational level), COVID-19 related variables (e.g., previous COVID-19 diagnosis and worry about the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines), and stress due to COVID-19 (e.g., danger and contamination fears, fears about economic consequences, xenophobia, compulsive checking and reassurance seeking, and traumatic stress symptoms about COVID-19) as possible predictors of COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Among pregnant women, 58.6% had received a COVID-19 vaccine. The most important reasons that pregnant women were not vaccinated were doubts about the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines (31.4%), fear that COVID-19 vaccines could be harmful to the fetus (29.4%), and fear of adverse side effects of COVID-19 vaccines (29.4%). Increased danger and contamination fears, increased fears about economic consequences, and higher levels of trust in COVID-19 vaccines were related with vaccine uptake. On the other hand, increased compulsive checking and reassurance seeking and increased worry about the adverse side effects of COVID-19 vaccines reduced the likelihood of pregnant women being vaccinated. An understanding of the psychosocial factors associated with increased COVID-19 vaccine uptake in pregnant women could be helpful for policy makers and healthcare professionals in their efforts to persuade women to get vaccinated against COVID-19. There is a need for targeted educational campaigns to increase knowledge about COVID-19 vaccines and reduce vaccine hesitancy in pregnancy.

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  1. Version published to 10.3390/vaccines11020269
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.04.06.22273526: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsIRB: The Ethics Committee of Department of Nursing, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens approved the study protocol (reference number; 370, 02-09-2021).
    Sex as a biological variableRecruitment of pregnant women began about one year after the Greek government has offered a free COVID-19 vaccine to all adults.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 21.0.
    SPSS
    suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Limitations: We should note a number of limitations in our study. Firstly, we conducted a cross-sectional study and therefore we are unable to establish a causal mechanism between psychosocial factors and COVID-19 vaccination uptake among pregnant women. Second, we relied on a convenience sample of pregnant women that cannot be considered representative of the population of pregnant women in Greece. For instance, the educational level of the participants in our study was high, while the participation rate of migrants was probably low since the questionnaire was only in Greek language. Furthermore, we used a valid questionnaire to measure psychosocial pattern of pregnant women but our data were based on self-reported measures which may introduce information bias due to tendency of participants to seek for social desirability. In addition, there are also other psychosocial factors that could affect pregnant women decision to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, e.g. anxiety, depression, quality of life, etc. Moreover, we did not measure some possible confounders, such as ethnicity, gestational week, at-risk pregnancy, vaccine type (mRNA or viral vector vaccine) that was offered to pregnant women, number of people in household, employment status (housewife or employed), and work location (working in person or working remotely). Conclusions: Our study is the first to assess psychosocial predictors of COVID-19 vaccines uptake among pregnant women with a valid instrument. This study is very...

    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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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2022.04.06.22273526v1 on medRxiv