Shook has spent most of 2020 studying<\/a> how behavior and social attitudes change, and what factors influence those changes, when people in the United States are faced with the threat of widespread disease.<\/p>\n Now she\u2019s turning her attention to developing and testing different kinds of messages to see if they can persuade individuals to get a COVID-19 vaccine. This study is supported through the Office of the Vice President for Research\u2019s COVID-19 Research Seed Funding (COVID-RSF2) Program<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are a lot of different factors underlying why people would get a vaccination or why people are wearing a mask or social distancing,\u201d Shook says. \u201cDeveloping an array of messages that tap into those different motivations is really important.\u201d<\/p>\n Shook and her team have found that germ aversion and disgust are strongly tied to concern about COVID-19 and engaging in preventive health behaviors. They also discovered that greater disgust sensitivity is connected to a greater willingness to accept a COVID-19 vaccine.<\/p>\n About 200 people who say they\u2019re unlikely to, or unsure if they will, get a vaccine will be recruited for the study. They will then be randomly divided into three groups. Participants in two of the groups will read messages about COVID-19 vaccination, while the third group won\u2019t receive any messages and will be used to see if vaccine hesitancy naturally changes over time.<\/p>\n Individuals in the disgust group will receive messages that contain information about COVID-19 symptoms and images that induce disgust. In the education group, the messages will contain information about the benefits of vaccination and correct misunderstandings. Afterward, all participants will fill out a survey that will measure their likelihood to get a vaccine, as well as their other vaccination-related attitudes.<\/p>\n \u201cKnowledge is power, but sadly knowledge alone is not always going to do it,\u201d Shook says. \u201cThe nice thing is disgust is pretty easy to elicit, and we\u2019ll see if that will add that additional motivational boost to get people to shift their intentions.\u201d<\/p>\n Shook\u2019s findings could have ramifications beyond the COVID-19 vaccine, as well. Deciphering which kinds of messages increase immunization could be applied to other vaccines that have low participation rates, such as the flu vaccine. In fact, Shook was beginning to study how to increase flu vaccination rates before the pandemic hit.<\/p>\n \u201cMy hope is that we can learn something and transfer this thinking about messaging to try and increase people\u2019s tendency to get flu vaccinations,\u201d Shook says. \u201cI hope there are broader implications from this work than just COVID-19 vaccination.\u201d<\/p>\n For now, though, COVID-19 is obviously the most pressing concern.<\/p>\n \u201cWe really need to figure out how we can motivate or persuade people to accept this vaccine,\u201d Shook says. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing how quickly they developed these vaccines, but if people aren\u2019t willing to accept it, it doesn\u2019t matter how much vaccine we make.\u201d<\/p>\n Follow the UConn School of Nursing on\u00a0<\/em>Facebook<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Instagram<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>, or\u00a0<\/em>LinkedIn<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" UConn’s Natalie Shook is researching what could be one of the most crucial public health questions in years – how to convince people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":167058,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2213,1877,2231,2235],"tags":[2251,2243],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2217],"class_list":["post-167053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coronavirus","category-nur","category-health-well-being","category-today-homepage","tag-coronavirus","tag-health-wellness"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 15:25:16","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167053"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167163,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167053\/revisions\/167163"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/167058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167053"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=167053"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=167053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/Shook-2x3-200x300.jpg\")