Associations Between COVID-19 Information Acquisition and Vaccination Intention: The Roles of Anticipated Regret and Collective Responsibility

ABSTRACT

While public health communication has been suggested to be a key for improving acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination, this study tested mediation pathways through which three types of vaccine information acquisition, i.e. seeking, scanning, and discussing, affect COVID-19 vaccination intention. The pathways comprise two mediators, i.e. anticipated regret due to inaction and collective responsibility. Results suggest that information seeking and discussing may have encouraged the intention to get vaccinated, but mainly indirectly through the two mediators. Information seeking and discussing may have elicited anticipated regret and collective responsibility, which in turn increased vaccination intention. The paths from information scanning were smaller in effect sizes and statistically unacknowledged. Implications and limitations are discussed.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported in part by grants from the University of Macau, including ICI-RTO-0010-2021, CPG20XX-00035-FSS, and SRG20XX-00143-FSS (ZXS PI), UMDF-007/202X (HWX PI), Macau Higher Education Fund (HSS-UMAC-2020-02, ZXS PI), and Jiangxi 2K Initiative through Jiangxi Normal University SJC (2018-08-10, Zhao PI).