Social Networks and Vaccination Decisions

Social networks and vaccination decisions

Social Networks and Vaccination Decisions

We combine survey responses, network data, and medical records in order to examine how friends affect the decision to get vaccinated against influenza. The random assignment of undergraduates to residential halls at a large private university generates exogenous variation in exposure to the vaccine, enabling us to credibly identify social effects. We find evidence of positive peer influences on...

The impact of social networks on parents' vaccination decisions.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Parents decide whether their children are vaccinated, but they rarely reach these decisions on their own. Instead parents are influenced by their social networks, broadly defined as the people and sources they go to for information, direction, and advice. This study used social network analysis to formally examine parents' social networks (people networks and source net...

Social contacts, vaccination decisions and influenza in Japan

BACKGROUND Contact patterns and vaccination decisions are fundamental to transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. We report on age-specific contact patterns in Japan and their effect on influenza vaccination behaviour. METHODS Japanese adults (N=3146) were surveyed in Spring 2011 to assess the number of their social contacts within a 24 h period, defined as face-to-face conversations wit...

Impacts of subsidy policies on vaccination decisions in contact networks.

To motivate more people to participate in vaccination campaigns, various subsidy policies are often supplied by government and the health sectors. However, these external incentives may also alter the vaccination decisions of the broader public, and hence the choice of incentive needs to be carefully considered. Since human behavior and the networking-constrained interactions among individuals ...