How dialogic vaccine communication in the workplace facilitates employee advocacy for covid-19 vaccine uptake

ABSTRACT Encouraging employees' vaccine uptake and motivating their vaccine advocacy are crucial steps to secure workplace health and safety during the current pandemic. Yet, how to achieve those steps remains challenging. To address this challenge, this study examines whether and how companies' vaccine communication efforts with employees, particularly dialogic communication, can motivate employees' advocacy behaviors for COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Specifically, by drawing insights from public relations, management, psychology, and health communication research, we predict that organizations' dialogic communication will enhance employees' perceptions of organizational support for vaccination, which will further increase employees' positive emotions while decreasing their negative emotions toward the vaccines. These emotional states will ultimately contribute to employees' vaccine advocacy. An online survey among 505 full-time U.S. employees supported our predictions. Our study advances public relations, organizational communication, and workplace health scholarships and practice by revealing the under-explored role of workplace communication in promoting public health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Characterizing discourses about COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter: a topic modeling and sentiment analysis approach.

BACKGROUND: Evidence-based health communication is crucial for facilitating vaccine-related knowledge and addressing vaccine hesitancy. To that end, it is important to understand the discourses about COVID-19 vaccination and attend to the publics' emotions underlying those discourses. METHODS: We collect tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines from March 2020 to March 2021. In total, 304,292 tweets from 134,015 users are collected. We conduct a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling analysis and a sentiment analysis to analyze the discourse themes and sentiments. RESULTS: This study identifies seven themes of COVID-19 vaccine-related discourses. Vaccine advocacy (24.82%) is the most widely discussed topic about COVID-19 vaccines, followed by vaccine hesitancy (22.29%), vaccine rollout (12.99%), vaccine facts (12.61%), recognition for healthcare workers (12.47%), vaccine side effects (10.07%), and vaccine policies (4.75%). Trust is the most salient emotion associated with COVID-19 vaccine discourses, followed by anticipation, fear, joy, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust. Among the seven topics, vaccine advocacy tweets are most likely to receive likes and comments, and vaccine fact tweets are most likely to receive retweets. CONCLUSIONS: When talking about vaccines, publics' emotions are dominated by trust and anticipation, yet mixed with fear and sadness. Although tweets about vaccine hesitancy are prevalent on Twitter, those messages receive fewer likes and comments than vaccine advocacy messages. Over time, tweets about vaccine advocacy and vaccine facts become more dominant whereas tweets about vaccine hesitancy become less dominant among COVID-19 vaccine discourses, suggesting that publics become more confident about COVID-19 vaccines as they obtain more information.

How Dialogic Vaccine Communication in the Workplace Facilitates Employee Advocacy for COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake

Encouraging employees' vaccine uptake and motivating their vaccine advocacy are crucial steps to secure workplace health and safety during the current pandemic. Yet, how to achieve those steps remains challenging. To address this challenge, this study examines whether and how companies' vaccine communication efforts with employees, particularly dialogic communication, can motivate employees' advocacy behaviors for COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Specifically, by drawing insights from public relations, management, psychology, and health communication research, we predict that organizations' dialogic communication will enhance employees' perceptions of organizational support for vaccination, which will further increase employees' positive emotions while decreasing their negative emotions toward the vaccines. These emotional states will ultimately contribute to employees' vaccine advocacy. An online survey among 505 full-time U.S. employees supported our predictions. Our study advances public relations, organizational communication, and workplace health scholarships and practice by revealing the under-explored role of workplace communication in promoting public health. © 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Mpox Perceptions and Vaccine Advocacy among the Healthcare Workers of Solid Organ Transplant Centers: A Multicenter, Cross-Sectional Survey in Saudi Arabia.

BACKGROUND: In response to the global Mpox outbreaks, this survey aimed to assess the knowledge, perceptions, and advocacy of Mpox vaccines among solid organ transplant healthcare workers (HCWs) in Saudi Arabia. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among solid organ transplant HCWs in Saudi Arabia from 15 August to 5 September 2022. A total of 199 responses were received from participants primarily working in the kidney (54.8%) and liver (14.6%) transplant units. RESULTS: The survey found that most participants were aware of the 2022 Mpox outbreak, but the majority were more concerned about COVID-19 than Mpox. While the majority of participants thought laboratory personnel and HCWs in direct contact with Mpox patients should receive the vaccine, less than 60% believed that all HCWs should be vaccinated. Additionally, over half of the participants lacked knowledge of animal-human transmission of the virus. CONCLUSION: The results highlight the need for increased education on Mpox among transplant HCWs in Saudi Arabia, particularly regarding the virus's transmission dynamics and vaccines. This education is crucial to improve HCWs' understanding of this emerging disease, especially given their vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Experiencing herd immunity in virtual reality increases COVID-19 vaccination intention: Evidence from a large-scale field intervention study.

This study investigates the impact of an immersive virtual reality (VR) simulation of herd immunity on vaccination intentions and its potential underlying mechanisms. In this preregistered field study, N = 654 participants were randomly assigned to one of the three VR conditions: (1) Gamified Herd Immunity; (2) Gamified Herd Immunity + Empathy (with additional narrative elements); (3) Control (gamified with no vaccination-related content). In the Gamified Herd Immunity simulation, participants embodied a vulnerable person and navigated a wedding venue trying to avoid getting infected. A total of 455 participants with below maximum intentions to take a novel vaccine and without severe cybersickness were analyzed. The Gamified Herd Immunity + Empathy and the Gamified Herd Immunity conditions increased vaccination intentions by 6.68 and 7.06 points on a 0-100 scale, respectively, compared to 1.91 for the Control condition. The Gamified Herd Immunity + Empathy condition enhanced empathy significantly more than the Gamified Herd Immunity condition but did not result in higher vaccination intentions. Experienced presence was related to the change in vaccination intentions. The results suggest that VR vaccination communication can effectively increase vaccination intentions; the effect is not solely due to the technological novelty and does not depend on empathy.

A self-administered virtual reality intervention increases COVID-19 vaccination intention.

Effective interventions for increasing people's intention to get vaccinated are crucial for global health, especially considering COVID-19. We devised a novel intervention using virtual reality (VR) consisting of a consultation with a general practitioner for communicating the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination and, in turn, increasing the intention to get vaccinated against COVID-19. We conducted a preregistered online experiment with a 2×2 between-participant design. People with eligible VR headsets were invited to install our experimental application and complete the ten minute virtual consultation study at their own discretion. Participants were randomly assigned across two age conditions (young or old self-body) and two communication conditions (with provision of personal benefit of vaccination only, or collective and personal benefit). The primary outcome was vaccination intention (score range 1-100) measured three times: immediately before and after the study, as well as one week later. Five-hundred-and-seven adults not vaccinated against COVID-19 were recruited. Among the 282 participants with imperfect vaccination intentions (<100), the VR intervention increased pre-to-post vaccination intentions across intervention conditions (mean difference 8.6, 95% CI 6.1 to 11.1,p<0.0001). The pre-to-post difference significantly correlated with the vaccination intention one week later, ρ=0.20,p<0.0001. The VR intervention was effective in increasing COVID-19 vaccination intentions both when only personal benefits and personal and collective benefits of vaccination were communicated, with significant retention one week after the intervention. Utilizing recent evidence from health psychology and embodiment research to develop immersive environments with customized and salient communication efforts could therefore be an effective tool to complement public health campaigns.