Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-1-2023

Journal / Book Title

Vaccines

Abstract

Vaccine hesitancy (VH) remains an ongoing challenge in French society. This project explored how institutional trust and preference for information via social media (PISM) drive hesitancy. Across a large, nationally represented population, our findings show that PISM and trust are strongly correlated measures, with both independently predicting VH. Subsequent mediation tests show that social media operates as primarily an indirect contributor to VH through trust. Additional tests involving VH and non-VH typologies revealed that institutional trust consistently predicts greater general support for vaccines and reduced distrust in vaccination. Conversely, PISM directly drives vaccine distrust, with its impact on non-hesitancy fully mediated by institutional trust. Overall, these findings point to the relevance for researchers and public health deciders to address the nature by which people utilize social media information resources and how that interacts with levels of trust for national institutions.

DOI

10.3390/vaccines11081319

Rights

© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Published Citation

McKinley, C. J., Olivier, E., & Ward, J. K. (2023). The Influence of Social Media and Institutional Trust on Vaccine Hesitancy in France: Examining Direct and Mediating Processes. Vaccines, 11(8), 1319. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines11081319

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