‘Is It Safe? Is it not?’ A Youth‐Led Photovoice Study of Youth Perspectives of COVID‐19 Vaccine Confidence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Youth have been uniquely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite high rates of COVID-19 infection, youth had one of the lowest vaccine uptake rates. Certain characteristics can affect vaccine uptake, such as mental health and substance use, but it is important to understand uptake for an effective response to pandemics. OBJECTIVE: This study examined the perspectives of youth with mental health or substance use concerns on COVID-19 vaccine confidence, hesitancy and overall COVID-19 vaccine perspectives. METHODS: Using photovoice, a community-based participatory research method, a sample of 27 youth aged 14-24 years participated in a series of photography workshops and focus groups. Participants submitted final photographs for discussion. Focus groups were recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed. RESULTS: Four themes were generated: (1) Youth deciphered the vaccine discourse in a changing information landscape; (2) mixed perspectives of families, friends and loved ones influenced the vaccine journey; (3) complex societal influences affected views and decisions around the COVID-19 vaccine; and (4) youth navigated their vaccine journeys through first- and second-hand experiences. The four themes and subthemes highlight the evolution of youth's journeys with the COVID-19 vaccine over the course of the pandemic and into the late-pandemic period. CONCLUSIONS: Youth with mental health or substance use challenges navigated a complex environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The wide variety of factors influencing vaccine perspectives should be taken into account in public health messaging and future research on youth vaccine uptake. Youth-led and youth-engaged research can help solicit rich and meaningful perspectives of young people on important public health issues. PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION: This was a youth-led study. A youth research analyst conducted the study activities together with the support of a youth advisory group, an adult photographer with lived experience, and a scientific team.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".