Pro-vaccination personal narratives in response to online hesitancy about the HPV vaccine: The challenge of tellability

Experimental studies have shown that narratives can be effective persuasive tools in addressing vaccine hesitancy, including regarding the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is transmitted via sexual contact and can cause cervical cancer. This paper presents an analysis of a thread from the online parenting forum Mumsnet Talk where an initially undecided Original Poster is persuaded to vaccinate their child against HPV by a respondent’s narrative of cervical cancer that they describe as difficult to share. This paper considers this particular narrative alongside all other narratives that precede the decision announced on the Mumsnet thread. It shows how producing pro-vaccination narratives about HPV involves challenges regarding ‘tellability’ – what makes the events in a narrative reportable or worth telling. We suggest that this has implications for the context-dependent nature of tellability, the role of parenting forums in vaccination-related discussions, and narrative-based communication about vaccinations more generally

Narratives, Information and Manifestations of Resistance to Persuasion in Online Discussions of HPV Vaccination

There are both theoretical accounts and empirical evidence for the fact that, in health communication, narratives (story telling) may have a persuasive advantage when compared with information (the provision of facts). The dominant explanation for this potential advantage is that narratives inhibit people’s resistance to persuasion, particularly in the form of counterarguing. Evidence in this area to date has most often been gathered through lab or field experiments. In the current study we took a novel approach, gathering our data from naturally-occurring, non-experimental and organically evolving online interactions about vaccinations. We focus on five threads from the parenting forum Mumsnet Talk that centered on indecision about the HPV vaccination. Our analysis revealed that narratives and information were used by posters in similar quantities as a means of providing vaccination-related advice. We also found similar frequencies of direct engagement with both narratives and information. However, our findings showed that narratives resulted in a significantly higher proportion of posts exhibiting supportive engagement, whereas information resulted in posts exhibiting a significantly higher proportion of challenges, including counterarguing and other manifestations of posters’ resistance to persuasion. The proportions of supportive versus challenging engagement also varied depending on the topic and vaccine stance of narratives. Notwithstanding contextual explanations for these patterns, our findings, based on this original approach of using naturalistic data, provide a novel kind of evidence for the potential of narratives to inhibit counterarguing in authentic health-related discourse

Weight Stigma in Britain:The Linguistic Representation of Obesity in Newspapers

It is argued that weight discrimination is one the last socially accepted forms of discrimination. In the UK, weight is not listed as a legally protected characteristic under the 2010 Equality Act. This leaves individuals with obesity with no legislative support when faced with discrimination in places such as employment and education settings. In addition, the media are criticised as being a main catalyst through which negative ideologies about weight are introduced, reproduced, naturalised and advertised, as current journalistic guidelines surrounding discrimination do not make reference to weight. To analyse this further, this research explores the representation of obesity and individuals with obesity in British national newspapers from 2006 - 2016, with a corpus comprised of 16,419 articles and 9,750,159 words. The overarching aims of this research are to identify the prevalent linguistic patterns within the British obesity media narrative and analyse the extent to which they stigmatise obesity and people with obesity. Taking a corpus-assisted approach, keywords and frequent collocation, colligation and concordance patterns are identified using Corpus Linguistic tools, and then critically analysed within the analytical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. A variety of linguistic features and patterns are analysed including, metaphors, scientific and expert social actors and the reporting verbs which collocate with them and the colligation patterns of verbs, pronouns, adjectives and presupposition triggers. The semantic implications of the prevalent linguistic patterns are negative and dehumanising to individuals with obesity. It is argued this can promote socially divisive ideologies which position people with obesity against the rest of society. In addition, the linguistic patterns analysed all contribute towards a homogenous narrative which focuses on the prevalence of obesity, the health and economic ramifications of obesity and actions to be taken in response to obesity. It is argued this narrative sensationalises and misrepresents the issue of obesity, thereby simultaneously further accentuating the socially divisive ideologies identified at the micro-linguistic level, while misinforming audiences about obesity. Overall, this investigation finds that the British obesity media narrative has a deficit of balanced facts, compassion and respect to those with obesity and a surplus of sensationalism, misrepresentation and stigmatisation. It is argued that, given the influential platform of national newspapers, the sociological impact of this can be devastating and a revaluation of the way in which the issue of obesity is reported on is crucial to address this

Pro-vaccination personal narratives in response to online hesitancy about the HPV vaccine:The challenge of tellability

Experimental studies have shown that narratives can be effective persuasive tools in addressing vaccine hesitancy, including regarding the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is transmitted via sexual contact and can cause cervical cancer. This paper presents an analysis of a thread from the online parenting forum Mumsnet Talk where an initially undecided Original Poster is persuaded to vaccinate their child against HPV by a respondent’s narrative of cervical cancer that they describe as difficult to share. This paper considers this particular narrative alongside all other narratives that precede the decision announced on the Mumsnet thread. It shows how producing pro-vaccination narratives about HPV involves challenges regarding ‘tellability’ – what makes the events in a narrative reportable or worth telling. We suggest that this has implications for the context-dependent nature of tellability, the role of parenting forums in vaccination-related discussions, and narrative-based communication about vaccinations more generally

‘Am I being unreasonable to vaccinate my kids against my ex’s wishes?’ - A Corpus Linguistic Exploration of Conflict in Vaccination Discussions on Mumsnet Talk’s AIBU Forum

Online parenting forums are popular sources of information about childhood vaccinations, but vaccination discussions, especially online, are often polarised and polarising (Jenkins & Moreno 2020). This can have very real implications for ultimate vaccination decisions (Al-Hasan et al., 2021). Among the most visited parenting forums in the UK is Mumsnet Talk, hosted on the parenting website Mumsnet, which has a reputation for being straight-talking and combative. This supposedly applies particularly to its most popular Talk Topic, Am I being unreasonable?’ (AIBU), which also includes numerous threads related to vaccinations. In this paper we combine corpus-based methods with qualitative discourse analysis to examine over 6-million words of vaccination-related discussions on 895 threads on AIBU from the inception of Mumsnet in 2000 to May 2021. We provide evidence of a greater presence of confrontation-related language in these threads when compared with similar threads not on AIBU, zooming in on nine keywords that can be used as insults (e.g. ‘idiot’ and ‘bitch’). The use of these keywords reveals the multiple types of conflict at play, including between people with opposing and similar vaccine stances. While some insults are directed at each other within the forum, the majority are directed at external third parties, often the protagonists at the heart of offline conflicts detailed in the original post of an AIBU thread. We show that, although these insults perform impoliteness towards external third parties potentially perpetuating conflict that predates any posting on the forum, they simultaneously have a supportive and community enhancing function within the threads. We reflect on the implications of our findings for the role of AIBU as a point of reference and site of interaction for parents facing vaccination-related issues and decisions

Narratives, information and manifestations of resistance to persuasion in online discussions of HPV vaccination

There are both theoretical accounts and empirical evidence for the fact that, in health communication, narratives (story telling) may have a persuasive advantage when compared with information (the provision of facts). The dominant explanation for this potential advantage is that narratives inhibit people’s resistance to persuasion, particularly in the form of counterarguing. Evidence in this area to date has most often been gathered through lab or field experiments. In the current study we took a novel approach, gathering our data from naturally-occurring, non-experimental and organically evolving online interactions about vaccinations. We focus on five threads from the parenting forum Mumsnet Talk that centred on indecision about the HPV vaccination. Our analysis revealed narratives and information were used by posters in similar quantities as a means of providing vaccination-related advice. We also found similar frequencies of direct engagement with both narratives and information. However, our findings showed that narratives resulted in a significantly higher proportion of posts exhibiting supportive engagement, whereas information resulted in posts exhibiting a significantly higher proportion of challenges, including counterarguing and other manifestations of posters’ resistance to persuasion. The proportions of supportive versus challenging engagement also varied depending on the topic and vaccine stance of narratives. Notwithstanding contextual explanations for these patterns, our findings, based on this original approach of using naturalistic data, provide a novel kind of evidence for the potential of narratives to inhibit counterarguing in authentic health-related discourse

The Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus (VicVaDis) : construction and exploration

This paper introduces and explores the 3.5-million-word Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus (hereon VicVaDis). The corpus is intended to provide a (freely accessible) historical resource for the investigation of the earliest public concerns and arguments against vaccination in England, which revolved around compulsory vaccination against smallpox in the second half of the 19th century. It consists of 133 anti-vaccination pamphlets and publications gathered from 1854 to 1906, a span of 53 years that loosely coincides with the Victorian era (1837-1901). This timeframe was chosen to capture the period between the 1853 Vaccination Act, which made smallpox vaccination for babies compulsory, and the 1907 Act which effectively ended the mandatory nature of vaccination. After an overview of the historical background, the paper describes the rationale, design and construction of the corpus, and then demonstrates how it can be exploited to investigate the main arguments against compulsory vaccination by means of widely accessible corpus linguistic tools. Where appropriate, parallels are drawn between Victorian and 21st century vaccine hesitant attitudes and arguments. Overall, the paper demonstrates the potential of corpus analysis to add to our understanding of historical concerns about vaccination