Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Vaccination continues to be an essential intervention to protect the health of people worldwide against infectious diseases. In recent years, a number of new vaccines have been made available to the public. However, concerns have emerged about the public's acceptance of an increasing number of vaccines. Some evidence of this has emerged in the response to the HPV vaccine rollout in Ontario; in particular as well is the ambivalence concerning the H1N1 vaccine - strongly desired by some, but still having a suboptimal rate of uptake across the general population. Several new vaccines are expected to be released in the near future, many of which will be targeted at children. The ultimate success of these vaccination campaigns will depend on the willingness of parents to vaccinate their children. Therefore, it is critical to understand what influences parents' decisions to vaccinate their children. To date, the focus of research has been on logistic barriers to vaccination. Relatively little work has tried to understand the psychology of the behaviours underlying people's decision to accept new vaccines. The primary objective of my thesis will be to examine whether theory-derived psychological constructs can provide more in-depth insight on how parents make decisions around vaccines for their children. We will examine whether psychological factors predict behaviour among subgroups of parents (vaccine rejecters, those unsure about the vaccine, and vaccine accepters). To this end, the method behind the study will be a systematic review of the literature, followed by a series of focus groups, leading to a more general survey of the population. This work will help inform public health authorities on how to tailor information, reasons and arguments that will be more effective in providing information that parents will find useful and in persuading parents with different beliefs about vaccination to change their behaviour.