Message Strategies and Viewer Responses: Content Analysis of HPV Vaccination Videos on YouTube

Communicating uncertainties regarding COVID-19 vaccination: Moderating roles of trust in science, government, and society

This study examined how uncertainty affects information seeking and avoidance behaviors via information insufficiency in the COVID-19 vaccination context. It also investigated how trust in science, government, and society moderate the effects of information insufficiency. An online experiment with 131 Korean adults showed that uncertainty indirectly affects information seeking intentions via information insufficiency, which is moderated by science trust and governmental trust. It also showed that uncertainty indirectly affects information avoidance intentions via information insufficiency, which is moderated by social trust.

Professionally Created Content Related to HPV Vaccination on TikTok

Despite the protective abilities of the HPV vaccine, roughly half of adolescents in the United States have not completed the recommended HPV vaccine series. Professionals have taken to using social media platforms to encourage health behaviors such as receipt of the HPV vaccine. As such, the purpose of this study was to identify content created by professionals related to HPV on TikTok. This descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted in January 2022 using the hashtag #HPV Vaccine to examine the 100 English language videos created by people who claimed to be health professionals. In addition to capturing metadata, each videos' content and subsequent comments were coded. Overall, 75.0% of the videos mentioned HPV-related cancer but few discussed vaccination as a cancer preventive measure (40.0%). More than half (52.0%) of the comments were neutral in tone and most focused on cancer (54.0%), alternative medicine (58.0%), and general questions about vaccination (62.0%). Comments about videos with greater numbers of “likes” more often mentioned cancer (85.0% vs. 46.3%, p = 0.002), the age at which to get vaccinated (70.0% vs. 41.3%, p = 0.02) and more frequently posed questions about vaccination (80.0% vs. 41.3%, p = 0.002) and cost and insurance coverage of vaccination (35.0% vs. 11.3%, p = 0.02) compared to videos with fewer “likes.” The power of provider information is paramount with HPV vaccine uptake. As providers increasingly create health messages on platforms such as TikTok, it is important that they remain aware of the potential for opposing or non-factual discourse.