How to Promote COVID-19 Vaccination in the Digital Media Age: The Persuasive Effects of News Frames and Argument Quality

Abstract

Vaccination-related information is important for the public to increase vaccine acceptance intention, while the guidance and persuasion effects of information are influenced by approaches to information presentation. Thus, this study has focused on news media, an important source of vaccination-related dissemination, and aimed to investigate how different presentations of news influence an individual’s COVID-19 vaccine intention. Moreover, whether the cultural values individuals possess would influence the persuasive effects of news information was also considered in our study. A web-based experiment among 310 participants employing 2 (news framing: rights frame vs. obligation frame) × 2 (argument quality: high argument quality vs. low argument quality) × 2 (individual–collective orientation: individualism vs. collectivism) design was conducted in this study. Data were analyzed through a series of analyses of variance (ANOVAs) in SPSS 26. The results show that argument quality had a significant positive impact on individuals’ psychological acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine. The results also show that the rights framework was significantly more persuasive than the obligation framework. Furthermore, for individualistic individuals, news information with high argument quality and a rights frame was the most persuasive. These findings may help guide the writing of news, thereby improving vaccine uptake, enhancing the public’s health literacy, and facilitating the implementation of vaccination policies during and after a pandemic.