Currently submitted to: JMIR Cancer
Date Submitted: Mar 13, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 15, 2024 - May 10, 2024
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Facebook users’ attitudes towards Human papillomavirus vaccination in South Africa
ABSTRACT
Background:
On February 28, 2023, the Facebook page of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) South Africa, announced the beginning of the HPV vaccination campaign for 2023. The announcement read: ‘‘Protect your daughter from cervical cancer and make sure she gets her HPV vaccine at school.” The post garnered several comments and reactions from Facebook users.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to examine the attitudes of Facebook users, who commented on the UNICEF South Africa post, towards HPV vaccination to inform the development and implementation of interventions that can increase HPV vaccine acceptance and uptake
Methods:
We used basic thematic analysis approach to analyse the content of the comments. Two authors (EJM and AJ) independently coded the responses through line-by-line readings as pro-vaccination, anti-vaccination or neutral. After labelling the data with the three main codes, we then used an inductive thematic analysis approach to extract emerging themes from the comments within each code.
Results:
Several comments were questions regarding the eligible criteria for vaccination, side effects, consent form, and vaccination strategies. Many Facebook users were hesitant towards HPV vaccination due to various reasons including concerns around side effects, religious beliefs, vaccine stock outs, and their distrust in the institutions or systems involved in vaccination programmes. Few users accepted HPV vaccination because they believed that it was a very important thing to do, beneficial for the children’s health, and they have vaccinated their children before.
Conclusions:
Our findings of the current study contribute to the promotion of acceptance and uptake of HPV vaccination by developing and implementing social media-based interventions tailored to address identified barriers that are associated with hesitant to HPV vaccination.
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