The Role of Communication Style and External Motivators in Predicting Vaccination Experiences and Intentions: An Experimental Vignette Study

ABSTRACT

This vignette-based study examined in a sample of unvaccinated Belgian citizens (N = 1918; M_age = 45.99) how health care workers could foster reflection about and intentions to get vaccinated against COVID-19 by experimentally varying their communication style (i.e., autonomy-supportive vs. controlling) and the reference to external motivators (i.e., use of a monetary voucher or corona pass vs. the lack thereof). Each participant was randomly assigned to one of six conditions and rated a vignette in terms of anticipated autonomy satisfaction, perceived effectiveness, reflection, and vaccination intention. An autonomy-supportive, relative to a controlling, communication style predicted greater autonomy need satisfaction, which in turn related positively to perceived effectiveness, reflection, and vaccination intention. External motivators failed to generate positive effects compared to the control condition. The findings highlight the critical role of autonomy support in promoting a self-endorsed decision to get vaccinated.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

All de-identified data and analysis code are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6323246.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2022.2125012

Notes

1. In a set of supplementary analyses, we repeated these analyses on the whole dataset (including the vaccinated participants and the participants who indicated that they would accept vaccination once they receive an invitation) to fully explore the effect of vaccination readiness. The same conclusions can be drawn as from the analyses on the subsample of hesitating and refusing citizens as reported in the main study (see Appendix A in Supplementary Material).

2. Figure 1S in Supplementary Material shows box plots to facilitate the understanding of the descriptive statistics and to provide a way of visually representing the distribution of the continuous outcomes.

3. Figure 2S in Supplementary Material provides the means for all outcomes in each of the six experimental conditions.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS; Belgian Ministry of Public Health; Research Foundation Flanders [3F023819]; Special Research Fund of Ghent University [BOFCOV2020000701].