Doing it for us: community identification predicts willingness to receive a COVID‐19 vaccination via perceived sense of duty to the community

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Wakefield, J ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9155-9683 and Khauser, A, 2021. Doing it for us: community identification predicts willingness to receive a COVID‐19 vaccination via perceived sense of duty to the community. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 31 (5), pp. 603-614. ISSN 1052-9284

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2542

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented huge challenges for communities across the world. Vaccines offer the best hope for controlling its deleterious effects, but not everybody is willing to be vaccinated, so it is important to explore variables that might predict vaccination willingness. The present study addressed this by drawing upon the Social Identity Approach, which posits that people’s membership of social groups is consequential for their thoughts and behaviour. Specifically, it was predicted that people’s strength of identification with their local community (a social group that came to particular prominence during the pandemic) would positively predict their willingness to engage in community-related prosocial normative behaviour (i.e., their perceived sense of duty, as a community member, to get vaccinated), and that this, in turn, would predict higher levels of vaccination willingness. Participants (N = 130) completed an online survey, which supported the hypothesised mediation model, even after controlling for subjective neighbourhood socio-economic status and age (two variables that are particularly likely to impact upon vaccination willingness). To our knowledge, this is the first study to apply Social Identity Approach principles to the study of COVID-19 vaccination willingness. The implications of the findings for governments’ efforts to boost vaccine uptake are discussed. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article’s Community and Social Impact Statement.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology
Creators:	Wakefield, J. and Khauser, A.
Publisher:	Wiley
Date:	September 2021
Volume:	31
Number:	5
ISSN:	1052-9284
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1002/casp.2542 DOI 1441225 Other
Rights:	© 2021 The Authors. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	25 May 2021 14:52
Last Modified:	13 Oct 2021 09:22
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42915