COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Scale: Psychometric properties and validation among pregnant and breastfeeding persons and parents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Vaccine Hesitancy Scale (VHS) was developed by the World Health Organization's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) to examine parents' vaccine hesitancy toward childhood vaccines. The VHS has been validated and modified to assess vaccine hesitancy toward specific vaccines, including influenza and human papillomavirus vaccines, but not the COVID-19 vaccine. The objective of this study is to validate a modified VHS for the COVID-19 vaccine among pregnant and breastfeeding persons, and parents of children under 12 years of age. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in British Columbia, Canada from October to December 2021. A total of 1510 participants including pregnant and breastfeeding persons, and parents of children <12 years of age were included in the analysis. Participants completed questionnaires tailored to their respective groups based on self-identification. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to assess the original VHS structure. The data were then randomly split into training and validation sets for exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Factor structure, internal construct validity, internal consistency, and known-group validity were evaluated. The original VHS model showed a poor fit. Exploratory factor analysis identified a revised one-factor model (VHS-COVID19), which showed satisfactory fit in the validation sample for pregnant participants (comparative fit index [CFI] = 0.999; root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = 0.041; standardized root mean squared residual [SRMR] = 0.008; Tucker-Lewis Index [TLI] = 0.997), breastfeeding participants (CFI = 0.995; RMAEA = 0.089; SRMR = 0.006; TLI = 0.990) and parent participants (CFI = 0.995; RMAEA = 0.080; SRMR = 0.004; TLI = 0.992). The revised scale comprised five items for pregnant and breastfeeding participants and six for parent participants . VHS-COVID19 showed high internal construct validity and reliability. The VHS-COVID19 shows adequate psychometric performance for assessing COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among pregnant, breastfeeding persons, and parents. It is easy to administer and can be used by healthcare providers to rapidly assess vaccine hesitancy of the targeted population in clinical settings. • We validated a modified Vaccine Hesitancy Scale (VHS) for COVID-19 among pregnant, breastfeeding persons, and parents. • A concise and refined version of VHS shows excellent psychometric performance. • The revised scale is easy to apply, enabling healthcare providers to assess vaccine hesitancy in clinical settings rapidly.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".