Are you willing to risk it? The relationship between risk, regret, and vaccination intent

Abstract

Medically unsupported concerns pertaining to the safety and necessity of childhood vaccines may have contributed to a proportion of American parents opting against measles, mumps, and rubella vaccinations. Given this, the present investigation sought to explore the influence of perceived severity, perceived likelihood, and anticipated regret on surrogate vaccination decision-making among parents of young children. An online survey was distributed to 110 parents with unvaccinated children between 0 and 23 months of age. Significant correlations were found among focal study constructs. Anticipated regret was found to fully mediate the link between risk perceptions and vaccination intentions. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings were discussed.

Keywords:

• vaccine
• anticipated regret
• risk perceptions
• children
• health

Notes

1. The Amazon Turk is a crowdsourcing venue that allows for the recruitment of participants to engage in survey research and other tasks. Prior to recruiting participants, the survey researcher sets a specific compensation amount for participants to receive in exchange for their time. After users complete the survey, Amazon distributes compensation to each participant.

2. Samples recruited through the Mechanical Turk are slightly more demographically diverse than (and at least as reliable as) typical Internet samples (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011). All participants were compensated with .35 USD.

3. This age range was chosen because it is recommended that children receive the first round of the MMR vaccine by 24 months of age.

4. Due to consistent missing values across scales, three cases were removed from the data-set. Another 21 data points that appeared to be missing at random were replaced with the series mean. Three additional outliers were removed via listwise deletion.

5. While it is recommended that children receive the first MMR vaccination prior to their second birthday, many children receive it earlier than the age of 24 months. As a result, a total of 110 participants had already obtained the first (but not second) round of the MMR vaccine for their child. To accurately assess the intentions of individuals who have yet to begin the MMR vaccination process, these cases were removed from the study.