How Implicit Attitudes toward Vaccination Affect Vaccine Hesitancy and Behaviour: Developing and Validating the...

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Public Health
• Behavioral Science

Background:

• Vaccine hesitancy undermines infectious disease control efforts, including COVID-19 vaccination campaigns.
• Traditional methods like questionnaires for assessing vaccine attitudes may be influenced by social desirability and defense mechanisms.
• A need exists for tools that can detect implicit attitudes towards vaccination, bypassing conscious biases.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and validate a novel tool, the Vaccine-Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (V-IRAP), for measuring implicit attitudes towards vaccination.
• To assess the reliability and validity of the V-IRAP in distinguishing between positive and negative vaccination beliefs.
• To investigate the incremental validity of the V-IRAP over explicit measures in understanding vaccine intention.

Main Methods:

• Development and validation of the V-IRAP, a modified Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure task.
• Assessment of the V-IRAP in a sample of 151 participants.
• Correlational analysis with explicit measures to evaluate convergent and incremental validity.

Main Results:

• The V-IRAP demonstrated good internal reliability and convergent validity with explicit measures.
• The V-IRAP showed incremental validity, providing additional insights beyond explicit self-reports.
• The tool identified negative implicit attitudes towards vaccine risks among unvaccinated individuals.

Conclusions:

• The V-IRAP is a sensitive and reliable instrument for assessing implicit attitudes related to vaccination.
• This tool can uncover unspoken reasons for vaccine hesitancy and refusal.
• The V-IRAP holds potential for future research on vaccine acceptance and public health interventions.