UI Advancing Research in Immunization Services Network Coordinating Center

Project Summary Multiple forces are undermining US vaccination rates, resulting in the reemergence of previously eliminated diseases. Despite decades of intervention development to improve vaccination outcomes, most interventions generally have little to no impact. This is especially true in rural areas of the United States. One reason why existing vaccination interventions may fail is the underlying assumption that non-vaccination is the result of either not knowing, or having misconceptions, about essential aspects of vaccination. However, the scientific evidence from evaluations of vaccination interventions generally goes against this assumption. Drawing on decades of research from political psychology and “motivated social cognition”, along with preliminary data for this proposal, we argue that people find vaccine confidence or hesitancy more attractive to the extent that they experience motivational factors to manage threats, reduce uncertainty, have cooperation-based social goals, and prefer objective information. For example, in one of our prior studies we found higher intentions to “catch up” on HPV vaccination for unvaccinated young adults that had stronger emotional reactions to rare threats, greater aversion to changing what they think, and higher interest in scientific or numeric information. We propose to improve how we promote vaccines by creating “motivational fit”, communicating vaccination-related information in such a way that vaccine confidence satisfies an audience’s motivational goals better than vaccine hesitancy. The overall objectives of this application are to 1) identify motivational factors that can be used to alleviate specific dimensions of vaccine hesitancy and improve vaccine uptake, especially among rural Americans, 2) create and test vaccination promotion strategies that have motivational fit for use with a public- facing website tailored to addressing specific dimensions of vaccine hesitancy, and 3) lead the development of connections among the ARISe Network centers and our other partners to identify and create innovative solutions to address challenges in immunization services research and practice. At the conclusion of this funding cycle, we will have advanced our theoretical and practical knowledge about immunization service utilization, created a publicly accessible website to address vaccination concerns, made significant contributions to ARISe activities, and facilitated connections among ARISe Network centers and our partners that help generate innovative solutions to addressing the challenges facing immunization services utilization.