Mistrust and Missed Shots: Trust and Covid-19 Vaccination Decisions

Amelia Blamey and Ilan Noy

No 11134, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We investigate the effect of interpersonal and institutional trust on COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy. We ask whether interpersonal and institutional trust predict COVID-19 vaccination delay and refusal. We use an unprecedently rich and representative dataset of over 22,000 New Zealand respondents, sourced from the 2014, 2016, and 2018 General Social Survey. Respondents reported their trust in seven domains: Parliament, police, health, education, courts, media, and the general public. Their survey responses are linked to respondents’ later records of COVID-19 vaccinations and their socio-demographic characteristics, as collected in the 2018 census. We find that all measured trust domains exhibit a significant and negative correlation with vaccine hesitancy. As trust increases, vaccination hesitancy decreases and so does the time it takes people to vaccinate. The correlation is strongest for trust in police and interpersonal trust, and weakest for trust in media. By understanding how trust informs vaccination decision-making, we can better prepare for future pandemics and improve public health vaccination campaigns more generally.

Keywords: Covid-19; vaccination; trust; general social survey; GSS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11134.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11134

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().