Leuven Institute for Healthcare Policy, KU Leuven, Kapucijnenvoer 35, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Leuven Institute for Healthcare Policy, KU Leuven, Kapucijnenvoer 35, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Vaccine. 2019 Apr 24;37(18):2494-2501. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.03.041. Epub 2019 Mar 30.
In many regions of the world, vaccine hesitancy has become an important concern to public health. A key part of any effective solution to it is to gain an in-depth understanding of the problem: its scope, who holds hesitant views and for which reasons.
We adapt the original 10-item Vaccine Hesitancy Scale (VHS), which targets parental attitudes, to a more generic version that captures general attitudes to vaccination. We use this adapted VHS in a sample of 1402 British citizens, selected from a large online panel (N > 1,000,000) based on quota for age, gender, educational attainment and region (response rate 43%). The existence of VHS subscales is evaluated via exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. We describe the extent of vaccine hesitancy in the sample, and use simple and multiple regression analysis to examine associations between respondent characteristics and vaccine hesitancy.
Despite ambiguities in defining hesitancy, we found that a substantial part of our sample held hesitant views about vaccination, particularly for those items reflecting aversion to risks of side effects. Four percent responded in a hesitant way to all ten items and ninety to at least one of the ten items. In line with recent studies in other populations, we identified two subscales within the VHS: lack of confidence in the need for vaccines and aversion to the risk of side effects. We found significant associations between hesitancy and various respondent characteristics but the predictive power of these associations remained limited.
Our study suggests that whereas a substantial percentage of the British population is vaccine hesitant, these views are not clustered in typical demographic features. The small but important adaptation of the VHS to target general attitudes seems to result in highly similar psychometric characteristics as the original scale that exclusively targets parents. We provide suggestions for further validation of the VHS.
在世界许多地区，疫苗犹豫已成为公共卫生的一个重要关注点。解决这一问题的关键是深入了解问题本身：其范围、哪些人持有犹豫态度以及原因。
我们改编了最初的 10 项疫苗犹豫量表（VHS），该量表针对父母的态度，以一种更通用的版本来捕捉对疫苗接种的一般态度。我们在从一个大型在线小组（N>100 万）中根据年龄、性别、教育程度和地区进行配额选择的 1402 名英国公民样本中使用了这种改编的 VHS（应答率为 43%）。通过探索性和验证性因素分析来评估 VHS 子量表的存在。我们描述了样本中疫苗犹豫的程度，并使用简单和多元回归分析来检验受访者特征与疫苗犹豫之间的关联。
尽管在定义犹豫时存在歧义，但我们发现，我们的样本中有相当一部分人对疫苗接种持犹豫态度，特别是对于那些反映对副作用风险的厌恶的项目。有 4%的人对十个项目中的十个项目都持犹豫态度，90%的人对十个项目中的至少一个项目持犹豫态度。与其他人群的最近研究一致，我们在 VHS 中确定了两个子量表：对疫苗需求的信心不足和对副作用风险的厌恶。我们发现犹豫与各种受访者特征之间存在显著关联，但这些关联的预测能力仍然有限。
我们的研究表明，尽管英国人口中有相当一部分人对疫苗持犹豫态度，但这些观点并没有集中在典型的人口特征上。VHS 的微小但重要的改编，以针对一般态度，似乎导致了与专门针对父母的原始量表高度相似的心理测量特征。我们提供了进一步验证 VHS 的建议。
