The Effect of Perceived Risks on the Demand for Vaccination: Results from a Discrete Choice Experiment

PLoS One

William J. Edmunds¹  David Parkin¹  Md Z. Sadique²  Nancy Devlin³ 

[1] City Health Economics Centre, City University, London, United Kingdom;Department of Health Services Research and Policy, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom;Office of Health Economics, London, United Kingdom

关键词: Vaccination and immunization;    Vaccines;    Mothers;    Health education and awareness;    Infectious diseases;    MMR vaccine;    Rotavirus infection;    Adverse events;   

DOI  :  10.1371/journal.pone.0054149

学科分类：医学（综合）

来源: Public Library of Science

【 摘 要 】

The demand for vaccination against infectious diseases involves a choice between vaccinating and not vaccinating, in which there is a trade-off between the benefits and costs of each option. The aim of this paper is to investigate these trade-offs and to estimate how the perceived prevalence and severity of both the disease against which the vaccine is given and any vaccine associated adverse events (VAAE) might affect demand. A Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) was used to elicit stated preferences from a representative sample of 369 UK mothers of children below 5 years of age, for three hypothetical vaccines. Cost was included as an attribute, which enabled estimation of the willingness to pay for different vaccines having differing levels of the probability of occurrence and severity of both the infection and VAAE. The results suggest that the severity of the health effects associated with both the diseases and VAAEs exert an important influence on the demand for vaccination, whereas the probability of these events occurring was not a significant predictor. This has important implications for public health policy, which has tended to focus on the probability of these health effects as the main influence on decision making. Our results also suggest that anticipated regrets about the consequences of making the wrong decision also exert an influence on demand.

【 授权许可】

CC BY