Detecting adherence to the recommended childhood vaccination schedule from user-generated content in a US parenting forum.

ABSTRACT: Vaccine hesitancy is considered as one of the leading causes for the resurgence of vaccine preventable diseases. A non-negligible minority of parents does not fully adhere to the recommended vaccination schedule, leading their children to be partially immunized and at higher risk of contracting vaccine preventable diseases. Here, we leverage more than one million comments of 201,986 users posted from March 2008 to April 2019 on the public online forum BabyCenter US to learn more about such parents. For 32% with geographic location, we find the number of mapped users for each US state resembling the census population distribution with good agreement. We employ Natural Language Processing to identify 6884 and 10,131 users expressing their intention of following the recommended and alternativ

SUBMITTER: Betti L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8075195 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature