Browsing by Author "Lawrence, Heidi"

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    Conscientious Object-ion: Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Medical Controversy
    Lawrence, Heidi (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-12)
    Vaccination is power—power to prevent disease, power to shape populations, power to define sickness and health, and power to compel scientific beliefs into the bodies of people around the globe. It is unsurprising, therefore, that vaccinations have garnered centuries of dissent. Specifically, the conscience—the parent or patient’s perceived right to make vaccination decisions based on personal perceptions of acceptable risks—has been used since vaccination’s inception as a rationale for individual rights to refuse vaccines in the face of the very public health goals that vaccinations aim to achieve. Existing studies of vaccine disputes in medical literature have understood vaccine questions to be a problem of scientific knowledge or literacy, claiming largely that vaccine skepticism arises from a lack of proper comprehension or understanding of the scientific and medical bases for vaccination or statistical evidence proving vaccines are safe and effective. Studies of vaccination controversy in social science, communications, and historical literatures have largely examined the role that alternative notions of risk valuation, sources of trusted health information (such as preferring the advice of friends and neighbors to doctors), or conceptions of uncertainty have played in largely parental decision making about childhood vaccinations. Despite these extensive studies of vaccine sentiment, vaccine skepticism and refusal remains a small, though significant, voice in public debate. This dissertation examines vaccine discourses as object-oriented rhetorics—as rhetorics shaped and defined by the physicality of the vaccine’s operation—as a way of re-conceptualizing the vaccine debate. Using object-oriented theories from computer programming, philosophy, and rhetoric, this research examines the professional and public voices that make up contemporary vaccine controversy. Through three data sets, including interviews with physicians, parent discourses produced on the Internet, and survey responses from young adults, this dissertation observes that vaccines function as objects that have multiple, coexisting operations for different actors across the medical system. Consequently, vaccination controversy can be conceptualized not as accurate versus inaccurate understandings of science or as a conflict of perspectives, but instead as a by-product of multiple ontologies of vaccines at work under competing disease exigencies.
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    Cumberland Plateau Health District 2009-2010 Flu Season Vaccine Study: Final Report
    Marmagas, Susan West; Dannenberg, Clare; Hausman, Bernice L.; Anthony, Elizabeth; Boyer, Stacy Bingham; Fortenberry, Lauren; Lawrence, Heidi (Virginia Tech, 2011-08-31)
    The Cumberland Plateau Health District of the Virginia Department of Health commissioned a team of faculty at Virginia Tech in 2011 to conduct a small pilot study of seasonal flu and H1N1 vaccination practices in Far Southwest Virginia. The study was conducted between February and July 2011. The purpose of the study was two-fold: Understand the reasons why two specific populations (parents of elementary school-aged children and 18-25 year olds) chose to vaccinate or not vaccinate for H1N1 and seasonal flu in 2009-10, and Identify the contributing factors (e.g. logistical barriers, intentional reasons, or parental disengagement) that led to a decision to either vaccinate or not vaccinate. The study was conducted in a small rural county with a significant portion of the population living below the poverty line. The area ranks low in Virginia for health outcomes with more than one quarter of residents reporting to be in poor or fair health in nationally tracked county health statistics. The study had three components: a survey of 86 family units in two elementary schools, indepth in-person follow-up interviews with nine families, and a survey of 158 18-25 year-olds in two educational institutions in the region.
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    Urban Legends and the Flu: A Survey of College Students’ Perceptions
    Hausman, Bernice L.; Lawrence, Heidi; Casady, Megan; Fuller, Jessica; Shelley, Leanne; Wallen, Andria (Virginia Tech, 2012)
    Formally educated parents seem to be at the core of anti-vaccination movements. Since college and graduate students are young adults who will become the next generation of educated parents, our aim was to identify vaccination sentiments in this age group. This research could help elucidate vaccination practices and beliefs of parents in the future.