School of English, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
School of English, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK.
Med Humanit. 2023 Sep;49(3):487-496. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2022-012583. Epub 2023 Apr 6.
Understanding what makes communication effective when designing public health messages is of key importance. This applies in particular to vaccination campaigns, which aim to encourage vaccine uptake and respond to vaccine hesitancy and dispel any myth or misinformation. This paper explores the ways in which the governments of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) promoted COVID-19 vaccination as a first-line strategy and studies health message effectiveness by examining the language of official vaccination campaigns, vaccine uptake across the different nations and the health message preferences of unvaccinated and vaccine sceptic individuals. The study considers communications beginning at the first lockdown until the point when daily COVID-19 updates ended for each nation. A corpus linguistic analysis of official government COVID-19 updates is combined with a qualitative examination of the expression of evaluation in governmental discourses, feedback from a Public Involvement Panel and insights from a nationally representative survey of adults in Great Britain to explore message production and reception. Fully vaccinated, unvaccinated and sceptic respondents showed similar health messaging preferences and perceptions of health communication efficacy, but unvaccinated and sceptic participants reported lower levels of compliance for all health messages considered. These results suggest that issues in health communication are not limited to vaccination hesitancy, and that in the future, successful vaccination campaigns need to address the determining factors of public attitudes and beliefs besides communication strategies.
了解在设计公共卫生信息时，哪些因素能使沟通更有效至关重要。这尤其适用于疫苗接种活动，此类活动旨在鼓励人们接种疫苗，应对疫苗犹豫，并消除任何误解或错误信息。本文探讨了英国（英格兰、苏格兰和威尔士）政府将新冠疫苗接种作为首要策略的方式，并通过考察官方疫苗接种活动的语言、不同国家的疫苗接种率以及未接种和对疫苗持怀疑态度的个人对健康信息的偏好，研究了卫生信息的有效性。该研究考虑了从第一次封锁开始到每个国家停止每日新冠疫情更新时的沟通情况。对官方政府新冠疫情更新的语料库语言学分析，结合对政府话语中评价表达的定性研究、公众参与小组的反馈以及对英国成年人的全国代表性调查的见解，共同探讨了信息的制作和接收。完全接种、未接种和持怀疑态度的受访者表现出类似的健康信息偏好和对健康传播效果的认知，但所有被认为的健康信息的接种和持怀疑态度的参与者的遵守程度较低。这些结果表明，健康传播中的问题不仅限于疫苗犹豫，未来成功的疫苗接种活动需要解决公众态度和信念的决定因素，而不仅仅是沟通策略。
