Faculty of Education in Science and Technology, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3200003, Israel.
Microsoft Research Israel, 13 Shenkar St., Herzliya 4672513, Israel; Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3200003, Israel.
Vaccine. 2020 Mar 10;38(12):2691-2699. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.02.010. Epub 2020 Feb 12.
Experts are concerned about the spread and recalcitrance of vaccine misinformation and its contribution to vaccine hesitancy. Despite this risk, little research attention has been paid to understanding how individuals seek vaccine information online and evaluate its trustworthiness. Here, we hypothesized that when vaccine-hesitant parents seek information about vaccines, they prefer trustworthy sources based on their competence, integrity and benevolence. We explored this issue using 4910 questions and 2583 answers retrieved from two social question-and-answer (Q&A) platforms: "Yahoo! Answers" and the Facebook group "Talking about Vaccines." We examined what kinds of questions are asked about vaccines, to what extent they are explicitly directed at health professionals or parents, and what features of the answers predict perceived answer quality, based on the theory of epistemic trust. The findings indicate that on different platforms, vaccine-related questions focus on different topics; namely, questions on one platform focused on the risks and benefits of vaccination, whereas they dealt with vaccine schedules on the other. On both platforms, most questions did not specify that an answer should be based on professional expertise or parents' experience. Both pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine answers were proportionately represented among the "best answers". However, if an answer was written by a health professional, the askers and the community on "Yahoo! Answers" were twice as likely to choose it as the "best answer" to a vaccine-related question, irrespective of whether it encouraged or discouraged vaccination. By contrast, an online experiment revealed that both the identity of the respondent and the stance towards vaccination affected the perceived trustworthiness of the answers. These findings indicate that despite the proliferation of anti-vaccine messages, epistemic trust in mainstream science and medicine is robust. User responses to expert answers suggest that expert outreach in online environments may be an effective intervention to address vaccine hesitancy.
专家们担心疫苗错误信息的传播和顽固性及其对疫苗犹豫的影响。尽管存在这种风险，但很少有研究关注理解个人如何在线寻找疫苗信息并评估其可信度。在这里，我们假设当疫苗犹豫的父母寻找有关疫苗的信息时，他们会根据能力、正直和善良选择值得信赖的来源。我们使用从两个社交问答（Q&A）平台“雅虎问答”和 Facebook 群组“谈论疫苗”中检索到的 4910 个问题和 2583 个答案来探讨这个问题。我们检查了关于疫苗的问题有哪些，它们在多大程度上明确针对卫生专业人员或父母，以及答案的哪些特征根据认识论信任理论预测感知的答案质量。研究结果表明，在不同的平台上，与疫苗相关的问题关注不同的主题；即，一个平台上的问题侧重于接种疫苗的风险和益处，而另一个平台则涉及疫苗接种时间表。在两个平台上，大多数问题都没有指定答案应基于专业知识或父母的经验。赞成疫苗和反对疫苗的答案在“最佳答案”中都有相应的比例。然而，如果答案是由卫生专业人员撰写的，那么“雅虎问答”的提问者和社区选择它作为与疫苗相关问题的“最佳答案”的可能性是选择其他答案的两倍，无论它是否鼓励或劝阻接种疫苗。相比之下，一项在线实验表明，回答者的身份和对疫苗接种的立场都会影响答案的可信赖性。这些发现表明，尽管反疫苗信息大量传播，但对主流科学和医学的认识论信任是强大的。用户对专家回答的反应表明，在在线环境中进行专家外联可能是解决疫苗犹豫的有效干预措施。
