Do social media campaigns foster vaccination adherence? A systematic review of prior intervention-based campaigns on social media.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance of large-scale campaigns to facilitate vaccination adherence. Social media presents unique opportunities to reach broader audiences and reduces the costs of conducting national or global campaigns aimed at achieving herd immunity. Nonetheless, few studies have reviewed the effectiveness of prior social media campaigns for vaccination adherence, and several prior studies have shown that social media campaigns do not increase uptake rates. Hence, our objective is to conduct a systematic review to examine the effectiveness of social media campaigns and to identify the reasons for the mixed results of prior studies. Our methodology began with a search of seven databases, which resulted in the identification of 92 interventions conducted over digital media. Out of these 92 studies, only 15 adopted social media campaigns for immunization. We analyzed these 15 studies, along with a coding scheme we developed based on reviews of both health interventions and social media campaigns. Multiple coders, who were knowledgeable about social media campaigns and healthcare, analyzed the 15 cases and obtained an acceptable level of inter-coder reliability (> .80). The results from our systematic review show that only a few social media campaigns have succeeded in enhancing vaccination adherence. In addition, few campaigns have utilized known critical success factors of social media to induce vaccination adherence. Based on these findings, we discuss a set of research questions that informatics scholars should consider when identifying opportunities for using social media to resolve one of the most resilient challenges in public health. Finally, we conclude by discussing how the insights drawn from our systematic reviews contribute to advancing theories, such as social influence and the health belief model, into the realm of social media-based health interventions.

The mediating role of vaccine hesitancy between maternal engagement with anti- and pro-vaccine social media posts and adolescent HPV-vaccine uptake rates in the US: The perspective of loss aversion in emotion-laden decision circumstances.

While Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is a prominent cause of cervical cancer and mortality among underserved women, HPV vaccine completion rates remain stagnant (54%) among US adolescents. Our objective is to identify how adolescents' mothers' engagement with anti-vaccine versus pro-vaccine social media content is associated with their children's HPV vaccination rates via increased vaccine hesitancy. We employ the notion of loss aversion escalated in an emotion-laden circumstance in consumer behavior literature given that HPV vaccination decisions directly affect children's well-being. Based on this escalated loss aversion tendency for an emotion-laden decision, we explain why anti-vaccine content disproportionately increases mothers' overarching vaccine hesitancy, while pro-vaccine content does not decrease vaccine hesitancy. We conducted a population-based survey among 426 mothers of US adolescents aged 13-18. Our sample closely mimics the socioeconomic and demographic factors of the population group of mothers of adolescents in the US census. Our results show that anti-vaccine social media posts are associated with increases in mothers' overarching vaccine hesitancy and with decreases in their children's HPV vaccination rates, while pro-vaccine content has no significant association with either.