Measuring psychosocial determinants of vaccination behavior in healthcare professionals: validation of the Pro-VC-Be short-form questionnaire

ABSTRACT

Background

Vaccine confidence among health care professionals (HCPs) is a key determinant of vaccination behaviors. We validate a short-form version of the 31-item Pro-VC-Be (Health Professionals Vaccine Confidence and Behaviors) questionnaire that measures HCPs’ confidence in and commitment to vaccination.

Research design and methods

A cross-sectional survey among 2,696 HCPs established a long-form tool to measure 10 dimensions of psychosocial determinants of vaccination behaviors. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) models tested the construct validity of 69,984 combinations of items in a 10-item short form tool. The criterion validity of this tool was tested with four behavioral and attitudinal outcomes using weighted modified Poisson regressions. An immunization resource score was constructed from summing the responses of the dimensions that can influence HCPs’ pro-vaccination behaviors: vaccine confidence, proactive efficacy, and trust in authorities.

Results

The short-form tool showed good construct validity in CFA analyses (RMSEA = 0.035 [0.024; 0.045]; CFI = 0.956; TLI = 0.918; SRMR 0.027) and comparable criterion validity to the long-form tool. The immunization resource score showed excellent criterion validity.

Conclusions

The Pro-VC-Be short-form showed good construct validity and criterion validity similar to the long-form and can therefore be used to measure determinants of vaccination behaviors among HCPs.

KEYWORDS:

• Healthcare professionals
• short-form tool
• vaccines
• vaccine confidence
• vaccine hesitancy

Acknowledgments

We thank the following experts for their advice on the original version of the Pro-VC-Be questionnaire: C Betsch, M Deml, KB Habersaat, J Leask, and JK Ward. We also thank the survey participants in all participating countries.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Ethical considerations

The ethics boards of the University-Hospital-Centre Saint-Pierre (Belgium, CE/20-10-14), the University of Aix-Marseille (France, 2020-12-03-010), and the University-Hospital Centre of Québec–Laval University (Québec, #2021-5286) approved the original study protocol and questionnaire.

The survey was conducted exclusively via the Internet in Quebec and Belgium, and via the Internet or telephone in France, therefore ethics committees approved that the completion of a questionnaire constituted participant consent by the health professionals and that written consent was not required.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Author contributions

PV, ED, and AG were involved in the conception and design of the original, long-form Pro-VC-Be. PV and ED were involved in the organization and implementation of data collection. LF, PV, and AmG were involved in the statistical analysis, interpretation of the data, and drafting of the paper. AG, ED, AF, LK, SL, AS, and PS were involved in the interpretation of the data and revising the paper critically for intellectual content; they approved it for publication. All authors agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14760584.2022.2108800

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Direction de la Recherche, des Etudes, de l’Evaluation et des Statistiques, French Ministry of Health, (Grant number 2102173353) and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (JITSUVAX Project, Grant number 964728).