Visual policy narrative messaging and COVID-19 vaccine uptake

In the face of vaccine hesitancy, public health officials are seeking more effective risk communication approaches to increase vaccination rates. We test the influence of visual policy narratives on COVID-19 vaccination behavior through a panel survey experiment conducted in early 2021 (n=3900) and then eight weeks later (n=2268). We examine the effects of three visual policy narrative messages that test the narrative mechanism of character selection (yourself, your circle, and your community) and a non-narrative control on COVID-19 vaccine behavior. Visual risk messages that use narratives positively influence COVID-19 vaccination through serial mediation of affective response to the messages and motivation to get the COVID-19 vaccination. Additionally, character selection matters, as messages focusing on protecting others (i.e., your circle and your community) perform stronger than that of yourself. Political ideology moderated some of the effects, with conservative respondents in the..., Our research team conducted a three-wave online panel survey through QualtricsXM of individuals in 50 U.S. states and Washington D.C. in 2021. We contracted with QualtricsXM to administer the survey using their proprietary panels of online survey respondents. These panel participants are recruited from a variety of sources, including website intercept recruitment, targeted email lists, gaming sites, customer loyalty web portals, and social media. Here, we present data from T1 (n = 3,900; launched between January 11 and February 3, 2021) and T2 (n = 2,268; launched between March 22 and April 9, 2021). In these survey waves, we conducted an experiment wherein respondents were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions in T1, comprised of three visual policy narrative treatment conditions (“protect yourself,” n = 986, 25%; “protect your circle,” n = 974, 25%; “protect your community,” n = 955, 25%) and a control condition (“get the vaccine”, n = 969, 25%). 
We conduct two mai..., The data file here is a CSV file. Hayes PROCESS may be conducted in SPSS, R, and SAS.Â