…mainly because I’m 7 months away from hand in and all I do all day every day is read papers, analysis data and try to write up.
It’s going well but more often than not it feels like I’m stuck at around this stage:
But in spite of the imposer syndrome, feelings of complete inadequacy and that voice inside my head saying I should be scienceing harder, it’s getting there now. As I mentioned previously my PhD is based at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a quite strange and wonderful postgraduate university that focuses solely on the topic of public health. This is fairly unique for what I can tell and means a wide range of academics coming to the school from a range of disciplines all with the aim to work on the biggest health challenges we face as a species at the moment. It’s all very exciting.
Me, I’m a psychologist. I work with a small group of anthropologist, sociologists and epidemiologists in a team called The Vaccine Confidence Project. Our area is the social science related to vaccine confidence, hesitancy and refusal.
Despite the overwhelming success of vaccination as a public health intervention occasionally safe, effective and available vaccines are rejected by individuals for a multitude of reasons. While the occasional rejections of a vaccine isn’t likely to do much public harm when rejection happens on mass outbreaks of infectious diseases and otherwise preventable deaths are more likely to occur. Our team investigates sentiment towards various vaccinations and make suggestions on how to address unmet needs.
To give you an idea of the type of work we do, here is an image from the state of vaccine confidence report that the team put out last year (disclosure: I was not involved in the project, other than just really appreciating the work that my colleagues did).
The report (the full version of which can be found here) outlines a survey conducted across 67 countries with the aim of measuring sentiment towards vaccine importance, safety, effectiveness and religious compatibility. The map illustrates the safety component of this research. Respondents were asked their level of agreement/disagreement with the statement “Overall I think vaccines are safe” reported here are the percentage of the respondents from each country that answered either disagree or strongly disagree.
Overall confidence related to vaccines is positive however this was found to differ dramatically between countries, with the highest level of safety concerns being reported within the European region.
Below is a breakdown of all of the questions for data collected within the UK. A nifty interactive tool that allows you to investigate the date by country can be found at the Vaccine Confidence Project website here.
As an academic psychologist (i.e. not a practicing, counselling psychologist as the term is sometimes used) this presents a fascinating topic for exploration. My work touches on issues of risk perception, uncertainty, information theory and cognitive biases, but above all my work focus on trust. It is a deeply worrying thing when the public losses trust in institutions. Trust forms the glue that holds our society together and if we’re not careful the erosion of it could be our downfall. During this - the era of fake news and post-truth - I can think of no other topic I’d rather be studying. Even after having been drowning in papers related to the topic now for many years I’m still occasionally amazed by some of the studies I read. As I continue with this blog I hope I can share with you some of the complexities I have come to appreciate related to vaccine confidence and how it relates to so many other issues that we face as we continue through, what is turning out to be, a fairly interesting 21st century.
Reference:
Larson, H. J., de Figueiredo, A., Xiahong, Z., Schulz, W. S., Verger, P., Johnston, I. G., ... & Jones, N. S. (2016). The state of vaccine confidence 2016: global insights through a 67-country survey. EBioMedicine, 12, 295-301.