The United States has made tremendous progress in using vaccines to prevent serious, often infectious, diseases. But concerns about such issues as vaccines' safety and the increasing complexity of immunization schedules have fostered doubts about the necessity of vaccinations. We investigated parents' confidence in childhood vaccines by reviewing recent survey data. We found that most parents-even those whose children receive all of the recommended vaccines-have questions, concerns, or misperceptions about them. We suggest ways to give parents the information they need and to keep the US national vaccination program a success.
Confidence in the value of vaccines is a helpful predictor of parent-reported vaccination behavior. Attitudinal constructs of confidence in the safety and efficacy of vaccines failed to account for additional significant variance in parents' vaccination behaviors. Future research should assess the role of vaccine knowledge and tangible barriers, such as access and cost, to further explain parents' vaccination behaviors.
Data from 1,581 faculty members affiliated with 98 doctoral-granting Communication programs in the United States were analyzed to determine normative publication rates and predictors of position centrality in the faculty hiring network. The Communication Institute for Online Scholarship (CIOS) database was used to measure publication frequency in refereed journals. Position centrality was measured using a Communication program's relative position in the hiring network as established by Barnett, Danowski, Feeley, and Stalker (2010). The average publication frequencies by academic rank were as follows: assistant professors averaged 2.29 articles (N = 441, SD = 3.29); associate professors averaged 6.69 articles (N = 497, SD = 5.77); professors averaged 10.92 articles (N = 542, SD = 12.09). Results from multiple regression analyses indicate the number of publications for faculty members and position centrality of where one earned his or her doctoral degree significantly predicted current position centrality. Publication numbers for one's advisor and year of earned doctorate did not emerge as significant predictors of position centrality.
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