The significance of folklore for vaccine policy: discarding the deficit model

作者：Kitta Andrea; Goldberg Daniel S

来源：Critical Public Health, 2017, 27(4): 506-514.

DOI：10.1080/09581596.2016.1235259

• Vaccination
• folklore
• lay beliefs
• medical decision-making
• policy
• belief formation
• evidence-based

This paper addresses the relevance of medical folklore for vaccine policy intended to increase vaccination uptake. There are two primary claims of this paper: First, that dominant approaches to increasing US vaccination uptake have largely been based on deficient understandings of the root causes of anti-vaccination behavior; and second, that superior approaches to evidence-based policy must enlarge the scope of that evidence base to include crucial findings on belief formation, technical, and risk communication, and the folklore of vaccination. The failure to attend to this evidence results in interventions that are disconnected from the factors actually driving vaccination refusal. The paper describes the deficiencies in dominant approaches, and based on its analysis of the root causes of anti-vaccination behavior recommends superior evidence-based policies that emphasize upstream structural determinants of health behaviors.

• 出版日期2017