The Role of Social Media in Disseminating Vaccination Information

Kok, Zhi Qian (2022) The Role of Social Media in Disseminating Vaccination Information. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

Social media is a communication and educational tool which plays an important role in providing information to users to make people more knowledgeable and helps people around the world keep in touch in their daily life. The study aims to find out the extent of social media’s role in disseminating vaccination information to influence people to accept vaccination. While the objective of this study is to find out people’s literacy in social media information about vaccines. Social media has brought out the inconvenience to the country where the anti-vaxxer spreads misinformation on social media that can spread widely to the public to create anxiety and fears towards vaccination. The theory used to support this research is Social Learning Theory where users in each educational level observe the information from sources on social media and imitate the behaviour from the model based on their literacy. A survey of 128 Malaysians in the age range of 18 to 41 and SPM to postgraduate level was conducted by online survey questionnaire for the data collection. According to the data analysis, people are able to identify misinformation on social media by not easily trusting the information to avoid being misled by them. Besides, people are also able to check the credibility of information by doing fact checking. Moreover, people also took action to share information about vaccines and accept vaccination. In addition, the higher education level of people has higher literacy in social media information and also higher reproduction on imitating behaviour from models. To conclude this research, the role of social media in disseminating vaccination information has successfully influenced users in each educational level and based on their literacy to accept vaccines.