Psychological characteristics associated with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and resistance in Ireland and the United Kingdom

By Jamie Murphy, F. Vallières, R. Bentall, Mark Shevlin, O. McBride, T. Hartman, Ryan T McKay, Kate Bennett, Liam Mason, J. Gibson-Miller and 5 more. Nature Communications, 2021

1,105 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Identifying and understanding COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy within distinct populations may aid future public health messaging. Using nationally representative data from the general adult populations of Ireland (N = 1041) and the United Kingdom (UK; N = 2025), we found that vaccine hesitancy/resistance was evident for 35% and 31% of these populations respectively. Vaccine hesitant/resistant respondents in Ireland and the UK differed on a number of sociodemographic and health-related variables but were similar across a broad array of psychological constructs. In both populations, those resistant to a COVID-19 vaccine were less likely to obtain information about the pandemic from traditional and authoritative sources and had similar levels of mistrust in these sources compared to vaccine accepting respondents. Given the geographical proximity and socio-economic similarity of the populations studied, it is not possible to generalize findings to other populations, however, the methodology employed here may be useful to those wishing to understand COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy elsewhere. Hesitancy and resistance towards vaccination is a challenge for public health. Here the authors determine psychological characteristics associated with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy or resistance attitudes in the UK and Ireland.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5fdc3f2c586997b026984c4d7aacaf419e5a4d3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

  1. A. R. Pedro
  2. M. Moniz
  3. P. Soares
  4. C. Nunes
  5. A. Leite
  6. P. Laires
  7. S. Dias
  8. A. Gama

Citations in the corpus