Effective vaccine communication during the disneyland measles outbreak.

ABSTRACT: Vaccine refusal rates have increased in recent years, highlighting the need for effective risk communication, especially over social media. Fuzzy-trace theory predicts that individuals encode bottom-line meaning ("gist") and statistical information ("verbatim") in parallel and those articles expressing a clear gist will be most compelling. We coded news articles (n=4581) collected during the 2014-2015 Disneyland measles for content including statistics, stories, or bottom-line gists regarding vaccines and vaccine-preventable illnesses. We measured the extent to which articles were compelling by how frequently they were shared on Facebook. The most widely shared articles expressed bottom-line gists, although articles containing statistics were also more likely to be shared than articles lac

SUBMITTER: Broniatowski DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4903916 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature