Measuring the 7Cs of Vaccination Readiness

Abstract

Abstract. Although vaccines are among the most effective interventions used in fighting diseases, vaccination readiness varies substantially among individuals. Vaccination readiness is defined as a set of components that increase or decrease AN individual’s likelihood of getting vaccinated. Building on earlier work that distinguished five components of vaccination readiness (confidence, complacency, constraints, calculation, and collective responsibility), we revised the questionnaire used to measure these components to improve its psychometric properties, specifically criterion validity. In doing so, we also developed two new components of vaccination readiness: compliance and conspiracy. Compliance is the tendency to support monitoring to control adherence to regulations; conspiracy is the tendency to endorse conspiratorial beliefs about vaccination. The newly introduced 7C scale was initially piloted in a cascade of serial cross-sectional studies and then validated with N = 681 participants from the COVID-19 Snapshot Monitoring in Denmark. We report a bifactor measurement model, convergent validity with other questionnaires, and an explanation of 85% variance in the willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19. We also present a 7-item short version of the scale. The instrument is publicly available in several languages ( www.vaccination-readiness.com ), and we seek collaboration to provide translations of our instrument into other languages.

Measuring parents’ readiness to vaccinate themselves and their children against COVID-19

“…The short scale was modeled as a g-factor model with correlated residuals for confidence and conspiracy (Figure 2). Both models fit the data acceptably (Geiger et al, 2021).…”

“…First, studying parental readiness to vaccinate children requires a psychometrically sound, validated, and efficient measurement tool. We present a tool for assessing childhood vaccination readiness in a long (21 items) and short version (7 items), adapted from the 7C scale of vaccination readiness (Geiger et al, 2021). We evaluate the measure by using latent variable modeling, suggesting and testing the same factor structure that was shown to account for individual differences in adult vaccination readiness for childhood vaccination readiness.…”

“…Childhood Vaccination Readiness scale. We assessed parents' childhood vaccination readiness using the 7C scale of vaccination readiness (Geiger et al, 2021) contextualized to COVID-19 and own children. Adaption to COVID-19 and childhood context was done by adding "COVID-19" when referring to the vaccine/vaccination or "child" or "children" to each item.…”

“…As proposed by Geiger et al (2021), the child-related 7C scale was modeled in a bifactor model (Brunner et al, 2012) with all items loading on a general factor (g-factor) and six orthogonal nested factors for all components besides confidence, which served as reference factor (Figure 1). For the short scale, we selected the same seven items as proposed by Geiger et al (2021). The short scale was modeled as a g-factor model with correlated residuals for confidence and conspiracy (Figure 2).…”

The effect of herd immunity thresholds on willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19

“…Unwillingness to be vaccinated against COVID-19 can stem from a number of sources (Geiger et al, 2021), including fear of negative side effects related to an expedited approval process (Lin, Tu, & Beitsch, 2021), conspiracy theories (Rieger, 2021), as well as not being at risk and having doubts about vaccine efficacy (Goldman et al, 2020). Gallup poll estimates placed the worldwide unwillingness to take the COVID-19 vaccine around 32%, or 1.3 billion people, in May 2021 (Ray, 2021).…”