Effect of Information about COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness and Side Effects on Behavioural Intentions: Two Online Experiments
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Abstract
The success of mass COVID-19 vaccination campaigns rests on widespread uptake. However, although vaccinations provide good protection, they do not offer full immunity and while they likely reduce transmission of the virus to others, the extent of this remains uncertain. This produces a dilemma for communicators who wish to be transparent about benefits and harms and encourage continued caution in vaccinated individuals but not undermine confidence in an important public health measure. In two large pre-registered experimental studies on quota-sampled UK public participants we investigate the effects of providing transparent communication—including uncertainty—about vaccination effectiveness on decision-making. In Study 1 (n = 2097) we report that detailed information about COVID-19 vaccines, including results of clinical trials, does not have a significant impact on beliefs about the efficacy of such vaccines, concerns over side effects, or intentions to receive a vaccine. Study 2 (n = 2217) addressed concerns that highlighting the need to maintain protective behaviours (e.g., social distancing) post-vaccination may lower perceptions of vaccine efficacy and willingness to receive a vaccine. We do not find evidence of this: transparent messages did not significantly reduce perceptions of vaccine efficacy, and in some cases increased perceptions of efficacy. We again report no main effect of messages on intentions to receive a vaccine. The results of both studies suggest that transparently informing people of the limitations of vaccinations does not reduce intentions to be vaccinated but neither does it increase intentions to engage in protective behaviours post-vaccination.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.19.21253963: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement Consent: Materials and methods: After providing consent, participants answered questions about their attitudes and beliefs around COVID-19 before being randomised via the Qualtrics randomisation function to an experimental group and answer questions about their COVID-19 vaccine beliefs and intentions. Randomization not detected. Blinding They were blinded to the randomisation. Power Analysis Participants: An a priori power calculation performed using GPOWER (Erdfelder et al., 1996) indicated a total sample size of at least N = 1,865 would be required to detect an effect size of f = 0.1 in a one-way ANOVA with five groups, at 95% power and an alpha level of .05. Sex … SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.19.21253963: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement Consent: Materials and methods: After providing consent, participants answered questions about their attitudes and beliefs around COVID-19 before being randomised via the Qualtrics randomisation function to an experimental group and answer questions about their COVID-19 vaccine beliefs and intentions. Randomization not detected. Blinding They were blinded to the randomisation. Power Analysis Participants: An a priori power calculation performed using GPOWER (Erdfelder et al., 1996) indicated a total sample size of at least N = 1,865 would be required to detect an effect size of f = 0.1 in a one-way ANOVA with five groups, at 95% power and an alpha level of .05. Sex as a biological variable not detected. 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:We must note some limitations to the current studies. Both used online panel samples, which may not be reflective of the wider UK population. However, we would note that our samples were matched to the UK population in terms of age and gender, and the proportion of participants willing to receive a vaccine was in line with weighted population estimates reported in a contemporaneous YouGov survey (88.8% in February 2021; Ansell et al., 2021). Readers should also be mindful that results from our UK studies may not generalise to other countries, as many local contextual factors can influence vaccine hesitancy (WHO, 2014). For example, the development of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine has been hailed by the media as a ‘British’ success story (e.g., Nuki, 2020) and this may lead to pro-vaccine attitudes being linked with national identity in the UK. In conclusion, we find that messages outlining the known risks and benefits of COVID-19 vaccines (with varying levels of detail) have little impact on vaccination intentions or beliefs about COVID-19 vaccines in UK online samples but some messages increase reported understanding of the risk and benefits. We also found no evidence that emphasising the need for continuing protective behaviours post-vaccination undermined vaccination intentions or perceptions of efficacy. These results indicate that there are no substantial effects of transparent communication on reducing vaccination intentions. However, they also highlight the need for t...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We found bar graphs of continuous data. We recommend replacing bar graphs with more informative graphics, as many different datasets can lead to the same bar graph. The actual data may suggest different conclusions from the summary statistics. For more information, please see Weissgerber et al (2015).
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.
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