Message Framing in Vaccine Communication: A Systematic Review of Published Literature

ABSTRACT

Suboptimal vaccination rates are a significant problem in many countries today, in spite of improved access to vaccine services. As a result, there has been a recent expansion of research on how best to communicate about vaccines. The purpose of the present article is to provide an updated review of published, peer-reviewed empirical studies that examined the effectiveness of gain versus loss framing (i.e., goal framing) in the context of vaccine communication. To locate studies, we examined the reference list from the previous meta-analytic review (O’Keefe & Nan, 2012), and we conducted systematic searches across multiple databases. We included 34 studies in the qualitative synthesis. The relative effectiveness of goal-framed vaccine messages was often shown to depend on characteristics of the message recipient, perceived risk, or situational factors, yet most effects were inconsistent across studies, or simply limited by an insufficient number of studies. Methodological characteristics and variations are noted and discussed. The review points to several directions concerning moderators and mediators of framing effects where additional rigorous studies would be needed.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and crucial suggestions for revisions. The authors also thank Andrada Cosma and Iulia Grec for their helpful feedback on an early draft of this work.

Notes

¹ The final search was conducted on July 31, 2016.

² Additional details on the search are available from the main author upon request.

³ Of the 16 studies, 2 were not published at the time of the previous meta-analytic review but were included as grey literature. They got published afterward, and we considered the published papers for the present review.