How Information Repertoire Affects Vaccine Hesitancy: Processes of Information Verification and Cognitive Elaboration

ABSTRACT

As information consumption plays a critical role in addressing vaccine hesitancy in the hybrid media environment, it becomes crucial to understand how individuals’ use of a combination of channels and sources affects their vaccine hesitancy. Based on information repertoire approaches emphasizing the multiplicity of channels and sources, we investigated different patterns of information repertoire related to the COVID-19 pandemic and how these patterns affected vaccine hesitancy through different informational mechanisms. Our results based on a U.S. sample suggest that while a richer information repertoire related to increased confidence in vaccines through increased information verification, this richness also corresponded with deepened vaccine hesitancy through heightened cognitive elaboration and perceived information inconsistency. Our findings support the utility of repertoire approaches for better understanding health information acquisition in the complex media ecology.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

As data were collected for a larger project, not all data were reported in this paper. There is another published study that used a different set of data to study convergence in crisis information acquisition, accessible at https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444822108886

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2022.2154017

Notes

1. Three dummy variables include DA (1 = yes, 0 = no), DU (1 = yes, 0 = no), and traditionalists (1 = yes, 0 = no). The reference group of each dummy variable was all the other groups.

2. It should be noted that the main model is more closely based on the studies and theories we reviewed. A better fitted main model compared to the alternative model helps to increase the confidence of our proposed mediating relationships and results.

Additional information

Funding

Data collection was sponsored by a seed grant from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media Research Center.