Are You Worried About Getting Covid-19 or About Losing Your Job?
How Different Covid-19 Related Fears are Indirectly Related to Vaccination Acceptance via Media Consumption
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47368/ejhc.2023.305Keywords:
fears, media consumption, alternative media, vaccination acceptanceAbstract
Although research showed that media consumption during Covid-19 is related to preventive behaviours, we know less about why people turn to quality or alternative media in the first place. We focus on the role of different fears. More specifically, we assumed that fears focusing on health threats were positively associated with the consumption of quality media and negatively with the consumption of tabloids and alternative media. We expected the opposite pattern for fears focusing on economic and societal threats, and that media consumption mediated the relationship between fears and vaccination acceptance. A survey among a representative sample of Germans (N = 1080) showed that the fears correlated as expected positively with the consumption of the respective media type. However, the predicted negative relationships with the other media type often turned out as non-significant. The fears were differentially related to vaccination acceptance via media consumption, indicating the theoretical and practical value of differentiating between different types of fears.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Sonja Utz, Markus Huff, Nadia Said
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The authors agree to the following license and copyright agreement:
a. Authors retain copyright in their work.
b. Authors grant the European Journal of Health Communication the right of first publication online on the internet (on the publication platform HOPE of the Main Library of the University of Zurich).
c. The electronic contributions on the internet are distributed under the „Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International“- License (CC BY 4.0). This license allows others to copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format, to remix, transform and build upon the material with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in the European Journal of Health Communication . These conditions are irrevocable. The full text of the license may be read under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
d. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of their work, as long as the conditions of the CC BY 4.0 License are fulfilled and initial publication in the European Journal of Health Communication is acknowledged.
e. Authors grant the Editors commercial rights, using a publishing house, to produce hardcopy volumes of the journal for sale to libraries and individuals, as well as to integrate the manuscript, its title, and its abstract in databases, abstracting and indexing services, and other similar information services.
f. This agreement is subject to possible legal disclosure obligations.
g. This agreement is governed by Swiss law. Court of jurisdiction is Zürich.
