A bourdieusian analysis of vaccine hesitancy. The case of Italian upper secondary school students

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to propose an original analysis of the association between social status and attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccines regarding upper-secondary students in Italy. The research was conducted by administering an online survey on a probabilistic and stratified sample of 5,699 students, in the spring of 2021, when the vaccination campaign in Italy had been underway for only a few months. Following the bourdieusian perspective, we have used a multiple correspondence analysis to examine the polarization between pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine groups as the clash of stances that agents take in accordance with their position in the cultural field. Our results suggest that the construction of a negative school experience by the subordinate classes is the source of a lack of social recognition in the cultural field, which feeds an aversion to everything the main institutions in this field recommend should be done.

KEYWORDS:

• Vaccine hesitancy
• embodied familial cultural capital
• social recognition
• education field
• habitus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Bourdieu argues that habitus derives from the internalisation of the organising principles of social division, corresponding to gender, geographical area (linked to the specific culture of a local society), level of education, age (not considered here due to the low variability in the population examined), and social class (Bourdieu, 1979/2001, pp. 468–469).

2. The version of SPAD adopted here is the 5.6.

3. The Test Value is computed using the Student’s T. Coefficients greater than 2 in absolute value are significant at the 5% probability level (DiFranco, 2016, pp. 1303–1304).

4. This value is to be considered high (see Benzécri, 1973): According to Benzecri, the eigenvalues provided by the MCA give a reductive evaluation of the inertia explained by the extracted factorial axes, because of the high number of modalities examined. This entails that we take into account many factors of infinitesimal importance. Therefore, if the inertia revaluation procedure proposed by Benzècri (also see Greenacre, 1984) is applied, the inertia of our indexes rises from 15.7 to 90.1% (the corrected inertia reproduced by the first factor is 82.4%, while the similar value of the second factor is 7.7%).

5. We avoided the distinction between ‘active modalities/variables’ and ‘illustrative (supplementary) modalities/variables’ (on this distinction, see Di Franco, 2016): the role of active modalities was also attributed in the analysis of sociodemographic variables. In fact, given the Bourdieusian assumption of a strong interconnection between social structures and cognitive structures (Santoro, 2014), we placed socio-demographic variables – which are more anchored in the analysis of the first type of structures – on the same plane as attitude variables, referring instead to cognitive structures.

Additional information

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, whereas the publication of this article is supported by a fund of Sapienza-University of Rome.