Repeated information of benefits reduce COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy: Experimental evidence from Germany

This replication package contains the raw data and code to replicate the findings reported in the paper. The data are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. The code is licensed under a Modified BSD License. See LICENSE.txt for details.

Software requirements

All analysis were done in Stata version 16:

Add-on packages are included in scripts/libraries/stata and do not need to be installed by user. The names, installation sources, and installation dates of these packages are available in scripts/libraries/stata/stata.trk.

Instructions

Save the folder ‘replication_PLOS’ to your local drive.

Open the master script ‘run.do’ and change the global pointing to the working direction (line 20) to the location where you save the folder on your local drive

Run the master script ‘run.do’ to replicate the analysis and generate all tables and figures reported in the paper and supplementary online materials

Datasets

Wave 1 – Survey experiment: ‘wave1_survey_experiment_raw.dta’

Wave 2 – Follow-up Survey: ‘wave2_follow_up_raw.dta'

Map: shape-files ‘plz2stellig.shp’ ‘OSM_PLZ.shp’, area codes ‘Postleitzahlengebiete-_OSM.csv’_, (all links to the sources can be found in the script ‘04_figure2_germany_map.do’)

Pretest: ‘pre-test_corona_raw.dta’

For Appendix S7: ‘alter_geschlecht_zensus_det.xlsx’, ‘vaccination_landkreis_raw.dta’, ‘census2020_age_gender.csv’ (all links to the sources can be found in the script ‘06_AppendixS7.do’)

For Appendix S10: ‘vaccination_landkreis_raw.dta’ (all links to the sources can be found in the script ‘07_AppendixS10.do’)

Descriptions of scripts

1_1_clean_wave1.do
This script processes the raw data from wave 1, the survey experiment
1_2_clean_wave2.do
This script processes the raw data from wave 2, the follow-up survey
1_3_merge_generate.do
This script creates the datasets used in the main analysis and for robustness checks by merging the cleaned data from wave 1 and 2, tests the exclusion criteria and creates additional variables
02_analysis.do
This script estimates regression models in Stata, creates figures and tables, saving them to results/figures and results/tables
03_robustness_checks_no_exclusion.do
This script runs the main analysis using the dataset without applying the exclusion criteria. Results are saved in results/tables
04_figure2_germany_map.do
This script creates Figure 2 in the main manuscript using publicly available data on vaccination numbers in Germany.
05_figureS1_dogmatism_scale.do
This script creates Figure S1 using data from a pretest to adjust the dogmatism scale.
06_AppendixS7.do
This script creates the figures and tables provided in Appendix S7 on the representativity of our sample compared to the German average using publicly available data about the age distribution in Germany.
07_AppendixS10.do
This script creates the figures and tables provided in Appendix S10 on the external validity of vaccination rates in our sample using publicly available data on vaccination numbers in Germany.