Poster Paper: Does Context Matter in Explicating Parents' Behavioral Decisions on Childhood Vaccinations?

Friday, November 7, 2014
Ballroom B (Convention Center)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Geoboo Song, University of Arkansas and A. Kate Miller, University of Oklahoma
Alongside surging public health concerns surrounding recent outbreaks of measles and pertussis in certain parts of the US, childhood vaccine controversies have gained much attention among scholars in health policy and politics. One of the most important questions to be answered in this regard is what explains individual parents’ behavioral decisions as to whether they vaccinate their children. Recent studies claim that individual parents’ values and beliefs pertaining to how social relationships (among members of society) ought to be structured and function -- notably cultural predispositions -- impinge upon the formation of their risk perceptions, policy preferences, and behaviors with regards to vaccination. One limitation of these findings is the absence of socio-ecological attributes that may set the context of the aforementioned individual-level factors that account for parents’ vaccine-related attitudes and behavioral decisions. Based upon different profiles of various communities’ general health-related behaviors created from the recent National Survey of Children’s Health, along with a recent original nationwide Internet survey of 1,213 American adults, I propose an analysis that examines potential regional differences in the ways in which individual parents’ behavioral decisions regarding childhood vaccinations are shaped.