Dalla Lana School of Public Health, 155 College Street, Health Science Building, 6th Floor, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Vaccine. 2012 May 28;30(25):3763-70. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2012.03.074. Epub 2012 Apr 6.
YouTube is a video-sharing platform that is increasingly utilized to share and disseminate health-related information about immunization. Using a pre-post survey methodology, we compared the impact of two of the most popular YouTube videos discussing seasonal influenza vaccine, both vaccine-critical, on the attitudes towards immunizing of first year medical students attending a Canadian medical school. Forty-one medical students were randomized to view either a scientifically styled, seemingly "evidence-based", vaccine-critical video or a video using anecdotal stories of harms and highly sensationalized imagery. In the pre-intervention survey, medical students frequently used YouTube for all-purposes, while 42% used YouTube for health-related purposes and 12% used YouTube to search for health information. While medical students were generally supportive of immunizing, there was suboptimal uptake of annual influenza vaccine reported, and a subset of our study population expressed vaccine-critical attitudes and behaviors with respect to seasonal influenza. Overall there was no significant difference in pre to post attitudes towards influenza immunization nor were there any differences when comparing the two different vaccine-critical videos. The results of our study are reassuring in that they suggest that medical students are relatively resistant to the predominately inaccurate, vaccine-critical messaging on YouTube, even when the message is framed as scientific reasoning. Further empirical work is required to test the popular notion that information disseminated through social media platforms influences health-related attitudes and behaviors. However, our study suggests that there is an opportunity for public health to leverage YouTube to communicate accurate and credible information regarding influenza to medical students and others.
YouTube 是一个视频分享平台，越来越多地被用于分享和传播与免疫接种相关的健康信息。我们采用前后测调查方法，比较了两个最受欢迎的关于季节性流感疫苗的 YouTube 视频对加拿大医学院一年级医学生接种态度的影响。41 名医学生被随机分配观看两种视频，一种是科学风格的、看似“基于证据”的疫苗批评性视频，另一种是使用轶事故事和高度耸人听闻的图像的视频。在干预前调查中，医学生经常将 YouTube 用于各种用途，而 42%的人将 YouTube 用于与健康相关的目的，12%的人使用 YouTube 搜索健康信息。虽然医学生普遍支持接种疫苗，但报告的年度流感疫苗接种率仍然不理想，而且我们研究人群中的一部分人对季节性流感表现出批评性的态度和行为。总体而言，对流感免疫接种的态度在干预前后没有显著差异，而且比较两种不同的疫苗批评性视频也没有差异。我们的研究结果令人安心，因为它们表明医学生相对不容易受到 YouTube 上主要不准确、疫苗批评性信息的影响，即使这些信息被包装为科学推理。需要进一步的实证研究来检验通过社交媒体平台传播的信息是否会影响与健康相关的态度和行为这一流行观点。然而，我们的研究表明，公共卫生有机会利用 YouTube 向医学生和其他人传播有关流感的准确和可信信息。
