How do young people and teens get information about vaccines? Is the early detection of concerns that might lead toward vaccine hesitancy possible? How can Institutions effectively address such concerns? Is it possible to promote health literacy through Instagram and Tik Tok? How should Institutions employ social media to reach teenagers, during a vaccination campaign? Our project analyzes the role of social media in health communication, and especially in vaccine-related perception and communication, with a focus on young people and teenagers. We consider the whole variety of vaccines targeting teenagers in Italy, including the HPV vaccine, the meningococcal vaccine and the anti SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.
Digital and social media represent an important source for the growing part of the population who turns to the internet in order to gather and share information. This also applies to health-related information: especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the vast majority of social media users accessed science and technology content through social media (for instance, 85% of Facebook users have interacted with this kind of content on the platform - Observa, 2021; for US data, see Neely et al., 2021). This is even more true when it comes to young people and teenagers, whose social media usage rates are much higher than those of the general population.
Along with purely scientific goals (aiming to advance knowledge in health communication, and more specifically in vaccine confidence and related communication), the current project aims to reach social impact by contributing knowledge to communication guidelines to be shared with relevant actors in order to enhance the effectiveness of health communication by public institutions, as well as by nonprofit organizations and the media system.
The project is innovative, as it:
- specifically addresses (Italian) teenagers, that are an important - yet understudied - age cohort for vaccine-related communication
- combines multifaceted expertise, including public understanding of science, generational approaches to social media (incl. generational representations of the "appropriate way" of using social media), bottom-up communication processes, social representations of health and vaccines, public health
- combines purely scientific goals with providing evidence-based knowledge for social impact
In Italy, a structured national study on vaccine hesitancy involving teens is lacking. Drawing upon social representations theory, and on studies on social representations of health, risks and vaccine-related issues, we will explore the ways in which teenagers understand vaccine-related issues, how they elaborate on them, how they form their opinions and beliefs. This topic has not yet been fully explored in literature. Exploratory social media analysis on WhatsApp and TikTok carried out by the research group, as well as preliminary surveys conducted with a convenience sample of 400 late teenagers, revealed a relatively high level of intention to vaccinate, and the desire to get a vaccine in order to contribute to herd immunity and thus accomplish their duty as `good citizens¿. Following this approach, getting a shot is perceived as a sort of civic engagement. Yet, relevant factors affecting vaccine hesitancy included trust, denial processes, conspiracy beliefs, and the variety of sources of knowledge teenagers use to collect information.
While health institutions and medical doctors play a crucial role in providing verified scientific information and elaborating public health policies, effective health-communication strategies can only be implemented by relying on solid social science knowledge, and especially on communication scholarship. The implementation of effective communication strategies relies on people's opinions and beliefs: the link between (mis)trust in science and scientific controversies has recently been stressed by Oreskes (2019). When science is perceived as a neutral method for developing knowledge, there is no room, in social representations of science, for consensus/dissent or majorities/minorities dynamics.
On the one hand, social media are often deemed responsible for spreading health-related dis- and misinformation. On the other, social media represent important arenas for users, who access information and share thoughts and concerns related to vaccines or can voice vaccine contribution in supporting public interests (e.g. herd immunity). Indeed, Institutions have often failed in fully exploiting social media for: a) gathering user-generated information (e.g.: what are the main reasons for vaccine hesitancy? What are the main concerns expressed by the population?), and b) spreading verified and effective information.
Especially during health emergencies, like the CoViD-19 pandemic, communication through digital and social media should not only follow the well-established guidelines for (social media) emergency communication (Comunello & Mulargia, 2018), but should also thoroughly consider: a) the doubts and concerns expressed by different parts of the population (in order to effectively provide answers to their questions); b) the ways in which different kind of users understand how each social media platform works, and the ¿proper way¿ to use it (Comunello et al., 2016). Users tend to develop a generational understanding of their social media experiences, reporting to use social media in their own way, which is perceived as `the right¿ (or legitimate) way. Strategies and hierarchies ¿differ with age, according to meanings and rankings attributed to media choices¿ (Fernandez-Ardevol et al., 2021; see also Comunello et al., 2021).
For (institutional) communication to be effective, different target groups and age cohorts, different platforms, different content imply different communication strategies and tactics. While this is not the case at an international level, there is still a lack of research on health communication and on the impact of social media on health communication practices by communication scholars in Italy. Moreover, there is an overall lack of research focusing on teenagers' understanding of health- and vaccines related issues.
We aim towards a deeper understanding of vaccine-related communication, including the ways in which teenagers search, process and produce vaccine-related information on social media; the ways in which vaccine hesitancy emerges (and is publicly articulated and spread), also highlighting the topics that contribute to its exacerbation; the communication formats and styles that are deemed more appropriated by teenagers (and by specific sub-targets, for instance in terms of age, gender, background, etc.) to spread vaccine-related information, with regard to different social media platforms.