Vaccine Uptake - Geographic Psychology or the Information Field?

Peter Romero, Eisaku Daniel Tanaka, Yuki Mikiya, Shinya Yoshino, Atsushi Oshio and Teruo Nakatsuma

No e191, Working Papers from Tokyo Center for Economic Research

Abstract: Rapid vaccine uptake is a crucial component of public health, and contributes towards a stable economy. While previous research shows influences from spatial distribution of personality, and temporal influences of the information field, we integrate both by help of a suggested framework. Partial evidence for the framework is delivered by a subsequent Japan-wide analysis of the influence of spatial personality and spatiotemporal changes in the information field. More concretely, we analyse 25,614,106 hyperlocal Tweets from 2019 to 2021 that cover all prefectures of Japan using J-LIWC2015, 14,418 responses to the TIPI-J collected between 2012 and 2019, 6,266 responses to the Japanese version of NEO-FFI and a COVID-19-vaccine-related questionnaire that covers cognitive, affective, and behavioural items. We offer three models that predict mid-term vaccine uptake, long-term vaccine uptake, and abidance by governmental measures. Results indicate that vaccine uptake speed is predicted by temporal distribution of the information field, geospatial distribution of agent and contextual personality (Extraversion), presence of severe COVID-19 cases, and agent belief systems. More concretely, relevant language (negative emotions, affected language, anxiety, risk-related language) that implies close proximity (family-related language), the presence of severe COVID-19 cases, contextual and agent Extraversion, as well as agent beliefs that vaccines are justified, predict vaccine uptake speed and abidance by governmental measures. For analysis, we suggest a semi-manual statistical feature reduction approach that allows injection of theoretical consideration by chaining traditional steps of statistics and statistical learning with human selection of final predictors. We then discuss possibilities to include our findings for enhancing vaccine acceptance, shaping better public health behaviors, customising and precisely targeting government communications to counter misinformation, fostering a healthier and more resilient society, as well as a more stable economy.

Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2023-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.tcer.or.jp/wp/pdf/e191.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:tcr:wpaper:e191

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Tokyo Center for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().