Validation of the vaccine conspiracy beliefs scale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Parents' vaccine attitudes influence their decision regarding child vaccination. To date, no study has evaluated the impact of vaccine conspiracy beliefs on human papillomavirus vaccine acceptance. The authors assessed the validity of a Vaccine Conspiracy Beliefs Scale (VCBS) and determined whether this scale was associated with parents' willingness to vaccinate their son with the HPV vaccine. METHODS: Canadian parents completed a 24-min online survey in 2014. Measures included socio-demographic variables, HPV knowledge, health care provider recommendation, Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ), the seven-item VCBS, and parents' willingness to vaccinate their son at two price points. RESULTS: A total of 1427 Canadian parents completed the survey in English (61.2%) or French (38.8%). A Factor Analysis revealed the VCBS is one-dimensional and has high internal consistency (α=0.937). The construct validity of the VCBS was supported by a moderate relationship with the CMQ (r=0.44, p<0.001). Hierarchical regression analyses found the VCBS is negatively related to parents' willingness to vaccinate their son with the HPV vaccine at both price points ('free' or '$300') after controlling for gender, age, household income, education level, HPV knowledge, and health care provider recommendation. CONCLUSIONS: The VCBS is a brief, valid scale that will be useful in further elucidating the correlates of vaccine hesitancy. Future research could use the VCBS to evaluate the impact of vaccine conspiracies beliefs on vaccine uptake and how concerns about vaccination may be challenged and reversed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".