Negativity in online news coverage of vaccination rates in Serbia: a content analysis

Abstract

Objective

This content analysis study explored how online news media communicates and frames vaccination rates and herd immunity (the effect where enough people are immune, the virus is contained).

Methods

We analyzed 160 vaccination-related news stories by nine highest-trafficked news websites in Serbia, published July–December 2017, around the start of the measles outbreak. We coded both the news story as a whole and every vaccination-rate mention (N = 339).

Results

News stories framed current vaccination rates and changes in them in a predominantly negative way (175/241 and 67/98 mentions, respectively) (e.g., “only 50% vaccinated”, “fewer parents vaccinating their children”), especially when referring to the measles vaccine (202/262 mentions). A total of 23/86 of news stories mentioning vaccination rates did not provide any numerical values. Reference groups for vaccination rates were rarely specified. Out of the 32 news stories mentioning herd immunity, 11 explained the effect.

Conclusions

Even routine communication of vaccination rates can be biased through negative frames and imprecise descriptions. Lamenting low immunization rates could activate a negative descriptive social norm (“many people are not getting vaccinated”), which may be especially ill-advised in the absence of an explanation of the social benefit of achieving herd immunity through vaccination.

Keywords:

• descriptive norms
• framing
• health communication
• immunization
• mass media
• vaccine

Acknowledgments

We thank Marija Petrović https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6422-3957 for her contribution to the intercoder reliability check. This work is part of Aleksandra Lazić’s PhD thesis titled Комуникација обухвата вакцином: Провера претпоставки модела себичне наспрам модела социјалне рационалности [Communicating vaccination coverage: Testing the selfish versus the social rationality hypothesis], under the supervision of Iris Žeželj, PhD.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors contribution

Aleksandra Lazić (Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology; Validation; Visualization; Writing - original draft; Writing - review & editing).

Iris Žeželj (Conceptualization; Methodology; Supervision; Writing - review & editing).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/5bkz8/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia under Grant [number 451-03-68/2022-14/200163].