Assortative mixing of opinions about COVID-19 vaccination in personal networks
Hâncean, Marian-Gabriel (University of Bucharest. Department of Sociology)
Lerner, Jürgen (University of Konstanz. Department of Computer and Information Science)
Perc, Matjaž (University of Maribor (Slovenia))
Molina, José Luis (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Antropologia Social i Cultural)
Geantă, Marius (Center for Innovation in Medicine (Romania))

Data:	2024
Descripció:	12 pàg.
Resum:	Many countries worldwide had difficulties reaching a sufficiently high vaccination uptake during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given this context, we collected data from a panel of 30,000 individuals, which were representative of the population of Romania (a country in Eastern Europe with a low 42. 6% vaccination rate) to determine whether people are more likely to be connected to peers displaying similar opinions about COVID-19 vaccination. We extracted 443 personal networks, amounting to 4430 alters. We estimated multilevel logistic regression models with random-ego-level intercepts to predict individual opinions about COVID-19 vaccination. Our evidence indicates positive opinions about the COVID-19 vaccination cluster. Namely, the likelihood of having a positive opinion about COVID-19 vaccination increases when peers have, on average, a more positive attitude than the rest of the nodes in the network (OR 1. 31, p < 0. 001). We also found that individuals with higher education and age are more likely to hold a positive opinion about COVID-19 vaccination. With the given empirical data, our study cannot reveal whether this assortative mixing of opinions is due to social influence or social selection. However, it may nevertheless have implications for public health interventions, especially in countries that strive to reach higher uptake rates. Understanding opinions about vaccination can act as an early warning system for potential outbreaks, inform predictions about vaccination uptake, or help supply chain management for vaccine distribution.
Drets:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Publicat a:	Scientific reports, Vol. 14 Núm. 1 (2024) , article number 3385, ISSN 2045-2322

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-53825-3
PMID: 38336858

12 p, 1.3 MB

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