About

‘Vaccine hesitancy’[1] is one of the top global health threats according to the World Health Organization, yet the reasons for it are not well understood: people may be hesitant to vaccinate their children or themselves for a wide array of complex and interconnected reasons.

The interdisciplinary Quo VaDis project team aims to uncover and explore these concerns by looking at how people actually talk or write about vaccination in different contexts. We want to better understand the range of pro-vaccination, anti-vaccination, and undecided views through language because how such controversial topics are talked about reflect and shape beliefs and attitudes, and potentially behaviour.

The project uses the latest techniques for large-scale computer-aided linguistic analysis to investigate discussions about vaccinations in English:

  1. on social media (Mumsnet, reddit, Twitter)
  2. in UK national press reports
  3. in UK Parliamentary debates.

Each of these datasets comprises millions of words and goes back in time. Vaccine hesitancy, after all, is not a new phenomenon. For the three social media platforms, the team will explore everything written about vaccinations since their inception (respectively, 2000, 2005 and 2006). The analysis of press reports will go back to 1990, and for UK parliamentary debates as far back as 1830.

To do justice to such quantities of data, Quo VaDis uses the computer-aided methods associated with Corpus Linguistics – a branch of Linguistics that involves the construction of large digital collections of naturally-occurring texts (known as ‘corpora’) and their analysis through tailor-made software. A corpus linguistic approach makes it possible to combine in a principled way the quantitative analysis of millions of words with the qualitative analysis of individual texts, patterns and interactions.

The team focuses on the different ways in which views about vaccinations are expressed, for example, through patterns of vocabulary, pronouns, negation, evaluation, metaphors, narratives, sources of evidence, and argumentation. We look at differences and similarities in pro-, anti-, and undecided views over time and across different groups of people, particularly as they form and interact on social media.

Our findings will make major contributions to understandings of vaccination views both in the UK and internationally. Through the involvement of our Project Partners <add hyperlink>, as well as more general engagement activities, our findings will be used as evidence for the design of future public health campaigns about vaccinations.

The project is based in the world-renowned ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University, which was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in 2015.

[1] ‘a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccination services’ (World Health Organization, 2017).

The Quo VaDis project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation (grant reference: ES/V000926/1).