Vaccine Mavens or Health Mavens?

ABSTRACT

Although topic-focused opinion leaders have been studied for decades, it remains unclear whether they are best conceptualized based on a narrow topic (vaccines) or a broader topic (health). Two studies were conducted to contribute to this discussion. The first (N = 397) examined the issue in terms of vaccine knowledge, tendency to promote vaccines, and trust in science. Results favored the vaccine maven over the health. The second study (N = 400) studied the issue by looking at self-other congruence in terms of perceptions of opinion leadership and advice seeking. Study 2 results were consistent with the validity of both types.

KEYWORDS:

• Mavens
• opinion leadership
• superdiffusers
• vaccines

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The term “maven” has been used in a variety of contexts after first being used in the marketing context by Feick and Price (1987) to describe someone with expertise in the concepts of buying and selling. The superdiffuser concept as proposed by Gladwell (2000) used the term maven to refer to opinion leadership on any topic. Boster et al. (2011) followed Gladwell’s broader use of maven.

2. We also included a measure of general health knowledge. Yet it was not retained for this analysis because the measure was extremely unreliable in this sample, possibly due to the low variance caused by over 95% of the participants choosing the correct answer on all but four of the 18 items.