An Oscillatory Path to Vaccination: The Roles of Normative and Epistemic Factors in Explaining Vaccination Hesitancy in COVID-19

ABSTRACT

This study examined the roles of normative and epistemic factors in influencing individuals’ reluctance to be vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Individuals’ ethical orientations (IEO; teleology vs. deontology) were introduced as normative characteristics, while COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy beliefs and vaccine knowledge were addressed as issue-specific epistemic factors. We conducted two online surveys to investigate each of these three factors’ influences on the level of Americans’ reluctance to receive COVID-19 vaccines. Combinations of these factors that predict COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy levels were also explored to provide integrated perspectives in the specific vaccination context. Our findings demonstrated the positive association between IEO and reluctance to receive COVID-19 vaccines. Significant interactions between 1) COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy beliefs and IEO and 2) conspiracy beliefs and vaccine knowledge were also identified. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future study were addressed.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Before the multiple regression analyses were performed, the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) was estimated to check potential multicollinearity of the independent variables. We observed that the VIF values associated with our original independent variables and interaction term were greater than 5, which raised a concern about the high correlation among these predictors. To reduce the VIF values based upon a more conservative rule that the value should not exceed 2.5, we created mean-centered independent variables to reduce their VIF values to near and below 2.5 to exclude the multicollinearity among our key predicted variables.

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.