Validity of the Spanish Version of the Vaccination Attitudes Examination Scale

Abstract

Individuals vary in the extent to which they have unfavorable attitudes towards vaccines. The Vaccination Attitudes Examination (VAX) Scale is a recently developed brief 12-item questionnaire created to better understand general vaccination attitudes. The current research aimed at providing a Spanish adaptation of the VAX Scale. After conducting an initial pilot study, Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis showed that the Spanish version of the scale had good internal consistency and factor structure (Study 1), discriminant validity from other individual differences measures (such as the Beliefs about Medicine Questionnaire and the Medical Mistrust Index) as well as good predictive validity of relevant vaccination-related outcomes (Study 2). In conclusion, in the present research, the Spanish version of the VAX scale proved to have a high internal consistency, showed convergent validity with other conceptually similar constructs, and successfully predicted vaccination intentions and vaccination decisions. Having this scale available in Spanish will allow researchers to analyze vaccination processes and vaccine hesitancy over a great number of people.

Adaptation and validation of a French version of the Vaccination Attitudes Examination (VAX) scale

“…We also found positive correlations between total scores of the VAX scale and all those of the Beliefs about Medicine Questionnaire (BMQ) subscales. These findings are in line with previous conclusions of a replication study assessing validity of the VAX scale and the Spanish validation of the scale [25,26] . Indeed, the perceived necessity for a treatment and eventual concerns about the adverse consequences of it has been identified as playing a role in patients’ attitudes and decisions about treatment [58,59] .…”

“…These results highlight that the VAX scale is a powerful tool to differentiate vaccinators from respondents who are more likely to refuse to get vaccinated against certain diseases. Moreover, our results replicate the findings of the other VAX scale validation papers [24][25][26] .…”

“…A strength of the VAX scale is that its scores have been shown to be significantly associated with previous vaccination behaviours and intentions to receive future vaccines [24][25][26] . Higher scores on all four subscales were found to be associated with higher risks of being unwilling to get a COVID-19 vaccine in 2020 [27] .…”

“…The VAX scale has been translated and validated into several languages including Turkish [28] , Spanish [25] , and Romanian [29] . However, there is currently no French version of the VAX scale although French is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world.…”

Validation and psychometric properties of the Italian Vaccination Attitudes Examination (VAX-I) scale

“…Recently, the VAX scale has been successfully validated in other languages, such as Romanian (Huza, 2020 ), Hebrew (Shacham et al, 2021 ), Spanish (Paredes et al, 2021 ), Turkish (Yildiz et al, 2021 ), and Telugu (Godasi et al, 2021 ). In addition, the VAX scale has also been adapted to specifically assess attitudes towards vaccines against COVID-19 (Shacham et al, 2021 ; Taylor et al, 2020 ).…”