Ricerc@Sapienza

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.