The Deficit and Contextual Models of Vaccine Hesitancy: A Test of the Mediation Paths

Abstract

The prevalence of vaccine hesitancy underscores the fact that the general public does not uniformly embrace scientific recommendations. Vaccine hesitancy represents a spectrum, encompassing both those who accept all vaccines and those who outright reject them. This paper aims to explore the relationship between science literacy, contextual factors, and vaccine hesitancy while accounting for specific mediation mechanisms. The authors applied a theoretical framework derived from the deficit model and the contextual model of public understanding of science. Hypotheses regarding the relationship between scientific literacy, religiosity, political identification, and vaccine hesitancy were tested. The authors also tested several hypotheses based on the assumption that the perception of scientific credibility and institutional trust are significant mediators of the above-mentioned relationships. The data from an online survey with a nationally representative quota sample of the Croatian population (with an average age of 42.6 years.) were used ( N = 1,500), while the data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results indicated that the perception of scientific credibility plays a significant role as a mechanism that translates the impacts of literacy, religiosity, and political identification. Institutional trust proved to be a significant mediator but in a way opposite to the hypotheses, which points to the need to contextualize the aforementioned relationships. The authors also determined that younger age, right-wing political orientation, higher religiosity, and lower scientific literacy were the determinants of hesitancy in both vaccine types (COVID-19 and vaccines in general), thus indicating that they might be connected to deeply rooted value dispositions.