Quantitatively Identifying Messaging Topics to Encourage West Virginia nurses’ COVID-19 Vaccination

Abstract

Nurses are particularly influential to others as it relates to COVID-19 vaccination decision-making and are at higher risk of COVID-19 themselves. Yet, nurses’ COVID-19 vaccination remains suboptimal. This study combines communication science frameworks with a novel conceptualize of identity—identity fusion—to explore why nurses may not vaccinate and what strategies might encourage them to protect themselves from COVID-19. Practicing nurses recruited from the West Virginia Nurses Association (N = 328) were asked about their nursing identity, COVID-19 threat perceptions, vaccination efficacy perceptions, vaccination social norms, and both vaccination and information seeking plans. Findings show that social norms may have particular influence over nurses’ vaccination intentions, though this is unique to nurses who do not view themselves as completely “fused” with the nursing identity. “Fully fused” nurses, on the other hand, may respond well to information conveying their particular risk for COVID-19. Data suggest information on one’s self-efficacy or ability to get vaccinated should be avoided, as it might discourage some nurses’vaccination. Findings are discussed in terms of how identity may influence vaccination.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ Personal social norms, rather than societal-level norms (see Park & Smith, 2007) were focused on here due to the 5C Model’s conceptualization of collective responsibility and social influence. This study was chiefly concerned with the perceptions of behavior, approval, and expectation of those important others within one’s social group. While the term “collective responsibility” infers more collective-oriented beliefs, Park and Smith (2007) discuss how these norms are actually in reference to the “society.” Given that vaccination behavior and particularly the conceptualization of responsibility in the 5C Model refers to those in one’s immediate surroundings and social group, this operationalization of social norms was deemed appropriate.

² Analyses using the Hornik & Woolf approach have also used a slightly different approach in which each possible belief target is individually regressed on intention and then ranked in order of individual regression coefficients. This was conducted as a supplemental analysis, which is available in Table S2 in the paper’s OSF page and includes an assessment of “Room for Improvement” (Dillard, 2016) or “Percentage to Gain” (Robbins & Neiderdeppe, 2011). These analyses show a similar pattern of results as the present analyses, and thus are provided as a supplemental analysis with preference for the reported analyses for consistency and space.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as administered through the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources through the West Virginia Center for Rural Health Development, Inc. under a subaward to the West Virginia University Public Interest Communication Research Laboratory under Grant 2021004. The findings and conclusions reported herein are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect any of the funders.