The Effects of Conservatism on Hesitancy Towards Receiving the COVID-19 Vaccine
Chloe Billy, Mariana Haugh, Rachel Remer, Victoria Rulapaugh, & Kianna Simien
a Research Methods Project supervised by Dr. Hilary Stebbins
(Spring 2021)
Stebbins_Billy_postercheck out these “elevator” talks from each group member
Very well thought out and carried through! Regarding media discernment; were any of the headlines related to who is more at risk of contracting COVID-19? Did the headlines have anything to do with political parties, or from specific news outlets geared more towards certain political stances (the real headlines)?
Hi Amy! Thank you for taking the time to comment on our poster 🙂 our headlines were about COVID-19 as a whole since they were replicated from the Calvillo et al. 2020 study. The headlines did not necessarily have anything to do with political parties, but there were definitely some that leaned more left/right!
Very well thought out and carried through! Regarding the headlines, did the real ones have anything to do with who is more at risk of contracting COVID-19? Were any of the headlines also geared towards specific political views or from news outlets that gear towards one party?
This is a really great and relevant topic! Each variable you all looked at seemed necessary to analyzing the full scope of vaccine willingness. This project definitely appeared to cover all (or most) of the bases associated with the outcome variable. The implications of the study were vast and followed the expected trends. While the poster has a lot of content due to the number of variables, it is organized well and the color palette is a great choice! The inclusion of media discernment was extremely interesting. Do you think looking at facebook use among conservatives would have been a better approach to gauge their belief in conspiracies, based on the mass spread of false information Facebook has been criticized for?
hank you Siena for your positive feedback. I think looking at the relationship between false information on Facebook, as well as other social media platforms, and media discernment, could be quite interesting and informative on learning how the public perceives certain information. Maybe future researchers could set up social media accounts where they display a mix of true and false information, relating to conservatism, and then monitor how people interact with the posts, or something to that affect. However, I think they would have to be careful, for this could potentially introduce some confounds and maybe even a possible third variable. Thank you again for your comment and time.
This is an interesting and super relevant topic right now. The variables make sense based on what you were researching and the results make sense with what we know about peoples’ ideals and perspectives on COVID-19 in general. It would be interesting to see more questions on media discernment and see if certain platforms would result in it being a predictor of willingness. The poster is very polished and very well organized!
Yes I agree, I think that the different places we got the media headlines could definitely influence peoples vaccine willingness. The places we got the headlines could change change their media discernment score and how that would affect vaccine willingness.
Thank you for your feedback, Abby! I think that your idea about looking at certain platforms would be very relevant and that would be a great study in the future. I appreciate the suggestions!
Thank you!! One headline was a false claim regarding immunity to COVID-19. None of the headlines had anything to do with political parties and the real headlines came from USNews.com which is relatively moderate.
Thank you! there was only question was regarding immunity to COVID which was a false headline. None of the other headlines were geared toward a specific political party all the real headlines came from USNews.com which is fairly moderate
Such an important and relevant topic to research! I had a couple of thoughts:
1. Did you look at literature on the characteristics associated with “anti-vaxxers” in general? I was just wondering if there was overlap in the characteristics of people who do not vaccinate their children and those who don’t want the covid vaccine or if they are completely different issues.
2. You mentioned recall issues as a limitation. You had a fairly large sample, so I was wondering if you would see similar relationships if you only analyzed the data from the people who are not yet vaccinated (of course this might lead to a restricted range for some of your variables if all of the more liberal people have already been vaccinated).
3. Did you consider running a multiple regression to look at the variables predicting vaccine use in the same model?
Thank you! We did not specifically look at literature on the characteristics associated with “anti-vaxxers.” This would be an interesting topic to follow up on to see how they treat and take care of their children would play a role in if they go the COVID vaccine or if they were related at all. About half of our participants already had gotten the vaccine so I would think that our results would be fairly similar if we only looked at the participants who had not gotten it. Yes we did run a multiple regression to see if our predictor variables predicted vaccine willingness.
Thank you! When doing some research I did look at some studies with “anit- vaxxers” studies. The overlap that I found was in both the “anti-vax” studies and ours it was found that and increase in willingness to believe conspiracies decreased vaccine willingness. We did not think about running our multiple regression with only people that had not been vaccinated but that is a great idea!
Hi all! I thoroughly enjoyed your poster as I am currently deciding if I should get the vaccine or not. In your analysis, did you find that social media played a role in COVID-19 vaccine willingness?
Hi Marie! We actually did not look at social media, but that would be interesting to look at. However, we did measure media discernment through use of news headlines, which was not found to be significant in our study. If I could go back I definitely would have included popular social media platforms because that’s mainly how younger audiences get their news and information these days. Thank you for checking out our study!
Hello! I enjoyed looking at your presentation and reading about it. When coming up with your idea, did you consider looking at social media posts that are geared towards one side versus the other? Or, did you consider looking at how “fake news” has influenced a person’s willingness to get the vaccine and how that aligns with their political views?
Hi Abby! We didn’t think to look at social media posts geared towards one political party or another, but that’s a great idea for future studies on this topic. We took the approach of looking at how media discernment was correlated with conservatism and COVID-19 vaccine willingness. Thank you for looking at our study!!
Abigail, we never considered looking at social media directly, but that would have been interesting to see as well. The closest thing to social media was the media discernment headlines since those are seen on social media platforms.
This was a great study and really important today! I also wonder if you had considered doing a multiple regression to see which variables predict the best. I was also interested in some of the intercorrelations you found. So conservative ideology is related to conspiracy theory beliefs. Do you think that is a new phenomenon with QAnon and some popular conservative conspiracies or do you think there is something about having a conservative ideology that makes people more prone to believe in conspiracies? Also, what does your research say about how public health officials should best communicate with vaccine hesitancy?
I really loved the ideas behind this study. A really interesting group of topics to ask about regarding COVID-19. Do you think you would have gotten more conclusive results if you had asked about fewer topics? Like just seeing covid as a threat and maybe conservitism vs liberalism?
Amazing project! I think it was really well-rounded and I appreciate how you incorporate measures like health, politics, and the media. They are all factors that determine how willing someone is into receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and I believe these factors will affect the U.S. population as long as COVID-19 exists. A question that I have is how do you think the results would be affected if you conducted the study last semester, considering the idea of a COVID-19 vaccine was still new? Do you think there would be more or less people more willing to receive the vaccine? Would people conservatism and media discernment increase or decrease, keeping in mind there was an election last semester?
I really like how this project related to such current information! I know that many people were skeptical of the vaccine when it was first introduced, so do you all think that if this study was done prior to the vaccine being released to the general public that any of the results would have differed?
Great job on your study guys! Your study was very thorough and so interesting to read and hear about. I find your topic very fitting for the current climate of the world. I truly do believe that at first a lot of people were a bit skeptical about the vaccine, and I think the media and politics played a large role in that. Great job!