Psychological characteristics associated with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and resistance in Ireland and the United Kingdom

Abstract

Identifying and understanding COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy within distinct populations may aid future public health messaging. Using nationally representative data from the general adult populations of Ireland (N = 1041) and the United Kingdom (UK; N = 2025), we found that vaccine hesitancy/resistance was evident for 35% and 31% of these populations respectively. Vaccine hesitant/resistant respondents in Ireland and the UK differed on a number of sociodemographic and health-related variables but were similar across a broad array of psychological constructs. In both populations, those resistant to a COVID-19 vaccine were less likely to obtain information about the pandemic from traditional and authoritative sources and had similar levels of mistrust in these sources compared to vaccine accepting respondents. Given the geographical proximity and socio-economic similarity of the populations studied, it is not possible to generalize findings to other populations, however, the methodology employed here may be useful to those wishing to understand COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy elsewhere.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	This paper has 15 authors. You can scroll the list below to see them all or them all. Murphy, J. Vallières, F. Bentall, R.P. Shevlin, M. McBride, O. Hartman, T.K. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9136-2784 McKay, R. Bennett, K. Mason, L. Gibson-Miller, J. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1864-4889 Levita, L. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6002-6817 Martinez, A.P. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7318-1020 Stocks, T.V.A. Karatzias, T. Hyland, P.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2021 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 13 November 2020 Published (online): 4 January 2021 Published: 4 January 2021
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Psychology (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	05 Feb 2021 14:41
Last Modified:	05 Feb 2021 14:41
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Nature
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41467-020-20226-9
Related URLs:	Dataset
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:169985