Unofficial Vaccine Advocates: Technical Communication, Localization, and Care by COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Participants

ABSTRACT

This article reports on an interview-based study with COVID-19 vaccine trial participants (n = 40) and addresses three strategies participants used to localize vaccine communication for their communities: (1) presenting embodied evidence, (2) demystifying clinical research, (3) operationalizing relationships. These strategies contribute to understandings of embodiment, relationships, and localization in technical and professional communication (TPC). They also show how participants used TPC to resist dominant individualist approaches to health and to practice collective care.

KEYWORDS:

• Vaccines
• COVID-19
• technical communication
• science communication
• localization
• embodiment

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the interview participants for sharing your stories, perspectives, and time with me. Interviews that started with questions about vaccines and clinical trial participation expanded to touch on so many elements of your lives and communities, and I hope this article does justice to the complexity of your clinical trial participation and communication.

This article was supported by a research grant from the University of Colorado Denver: The Office of Research Services New Faculty Research Grant. Thank you to Francine Olivas-Zarate for all of your help in administering participant compensation. Thank you to the Research Assistants who worked on this study, Tanner Starnes and Atal Esan. Thank you for your hard and careful work on transcriptions and analysis but, most of all, for your insightful collaboration and companionship and the new questions and perspectives you brought to this project. Thank you to the manuscript’s anonymous reviewers for your generative and thoughtful feedback, which not only helped me with this article but raised important questions that will inform my ongoing vaccination research. Finally, thank you to Dr. Rebecca Walton and the TCQ editorial team for your support and feedback throughout the review process.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In this article, I use the term “interviewee” (instead of participant) to refer to participants in this study. My intention is to distinguish vaccine trial participants interviewed for this study (interviewees) from clinical trial participants in general.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kari Campeau

Kari Campeau is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at University of Colorado Denver. She researches and teaches in the areas of rhetoric of health and medicine, technical & professional communication, and usability and user experience.