April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: Cross-national News Coverage of Vaccine Hesitancy: Community Structure Theory, Political Instability, and Privilege
A community structure analysis (Pollock, 2007, 2013a, 2013b, 2015) compared national characteristics and cross-national newspaper coverage of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in 19 different countries, examining all relevant articles of 250+ words selected from 12/14/2020 to 08/23/2021. The resulting 276 articles were coded for “prominence” (placement, headline size, article length, and presence of graphics) and “direction” (“government responsibility”, “societal responsibility”, or “balanced/neutral” coverage of COVID-19), then combined into composite “Media Vector” scores for each newspaper, from +1.000 to -0.0347: with a range of 1.0347. Eighteen out of 19 Media Vectors (94.74%) emphasized government responsibility for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Overall, a measure of political instability, specifically Global Peace Index, was robustly connected to media coverage emphasizing more government responsibility for COVID-19 responses, confirming the “vulnerability” hypothesis, which expects connections between vulnerable populations and coverage reflecting their interests (Pollock, 2007, pp. 61-100). The Global Peace Index (where positive values indicate political instability) was positively and significantly linked with media emphasis on “more” government responsibility for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy (r = 0.553, p = 0.007). It is reasonable to assume that media in less peaceful nations, in order to reduce instability, may advocate strong government action to combat vaccine hesitancy. Political instability can shape coverage. This finding is consistent with previous research connecting broad measures of macro “vulnerability” conditions (agricultural dependence, poverty level, political instability) and media emphasis on “government responsibility” for a wide range of health issues: genetically modified foods, drug trafficking, condom promotion, and food security (Pollock, 2020). By contrast, some measures of privilege, including female school life expectancy (r = -0.438, p = 0.039) and stock of direct foreign investment (r = -0.389, p = 0.050) were significantly associated with reporting emphasizing “less” government responsibility for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. The connection between measures of privilege and reliance more on society than government regarding COVID-19 vaccinations was unexpected. In previous community structure research, nations with higher proportions of educated females and direct foreign investment were associated with newspaper support for “more” intervention by domestic governments to address human trafficking challenges (Alexandre, et al., 2014, 2015). Empirically, regression analysis revealed that political instability (the Global Peace Index) accounted for 44.0% of the variance associated with media coverage emphasizing more government responsibility for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. By contrast, stock of direct foreign investment (22.1%), along with female school life expectancy (2.9%), collectively totaled 25% of the variance associated with media coverage emphasizing less government responsibility for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Methodologically, combining measures of both “prominence” and “direction” generated sensitive Media Vectors highlighting the capacity of media to reflect (nation-state) community measures of “vulnerability” and “privilege”. From a theoretical perspective, this COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy study confirmed empirical evidence from a founder of “agenda-setting” theory, asserting that agenda-setting’s “top down” perspective is robustly complemented by the “bottom-up” viewpoint of community structure theory’s community-level demographics (Funk & McCombs, 2017).