Trust Matters: The Effects of Social Media Use on the Public’s Health Policy Support Through (mis)beliefs in the Context of HPV Vaccination

ABSTRACT

This study examines whether social media exposure is associated with the public’s beliefs and misbeliefs about human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and how those (mis)beliefs are associated with the public’s support for HPV vaccination-related policies. This study also explores whether trust in HPV vaccination-related regulatory organizations moderates the associations between social media exposure and public policy support through (mis)beliefs. We found that social media exposure was positively associated with misbeliefs about HPV vaccination. The findings also indicated that while beliefs about benefits were positively associated with policy support for HPV vaccination, misbeliefs were negatively associated with this support. More interestingly, our analysis revealed that the negative association of HPV-related misbeliefs with vaccination policy support was larger for those who had low levels of trust, compared to their high-trust counterparts.

Acknowledgement

C.J. Lee. acknowledges the support of the Institute of Communication Research at Seoul National University and the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5B8070398). The study sponsors had no role in the study design, collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, writing the report, and the decision to submit the report for publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This study was approved by the Institution Review Board of a university located in Seoul, South Korea (IRB No. 1511/001-002).

2. The current study shares the same sample socio-demographics with other studies from the project. However, each study has a different subject and intention.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute of Communication Research at Seoul National University and the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5B8070398).