Social Media Vaccine Websites: A Comparative Analysis of Public and Moderated Websites

Jo Ann Shoup · Komal J. Narwaney · Nicole M. Wagner · Courtney R. Kraus · Kathy S. Gleason · KAREN J. ALBRIGHT +1 more

25 citations0/0 files storedHealth Education & Behavior

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy Misinformation and Its Impacts Social Media in Health Education

Abstract

The internet is an important source of vaccine information for parents. We evaluated and compared the interactive content on an expert moderated vaccine social media (VSM) website developed for parents of children 24 months of age or younger and enrolled in a health care system to a random sample of interactions extracted from publicly available parenting and vaccine-focused blogs and discussion forums. The study observation period was September 2013 through July 2016. Three hundred sixty-seven eligible websites were located using search terms related to vaccines. Seventy-nine samples of interactions about vaccines on public blogs and discussion boards and 61 interactions from the expert moderated VSM website were coded for tone, vaccine stance, and accuracy of information. If information was inaccurate, it was coded as corrected, partially corrected or uncorrected. Using chi-square or Fisher's exact tests, we compared coded interactions from the VSM website with coded interactions from the sample of publicly available websites. We then identified representative quotes to illustrate the quantitative results. Tone, vaccine stance, and accuracy of information were significantly different (all p < .05). Publicly available vaccine websites tended to be more contentious and have a negative stance toward vaccines. These websites also had inaccurate and uncorrected information. In contrast, the expert moderated website had a more civil tone, minimal posting of inaccurate information, with very little participant-to-participant interaction. An expert moderated, interactive vaccine website appears to provide a platform for parents to gather accurate vaccine information, express their vaccine concerns and ask questions of vaccine experts.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

References

1977The Measurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data 2009Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media 2013A New Dimension of Health Care: Systematic Review of the Uses, Benefits, and Limitations of Social Media for Health Communication 2009A postmodern Pandora's box: Anti-vaccination misinformation on the Internet 2014Online and Uncivil? Patterns and Determinants of Incivility in Newspaper Website Comments 2013The “Nasty Effect:” Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies 2010Parental Vaccine Safety Concerns in 2009 2010The Influence of Vaccine-critical Websites on Perceiving Vaccination Risks

Cited by

2019Digital Health Communication Common Agenda 2.0: An Updated Consensus for the Public and Private Sectors to Advance Public Health 2019The Impact of Social Media on Communication Sciences and Disorders: A Need for Examination and Research

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.