Browsing by Author "Patel, Kelsey"

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    Vaccination on the Internet: A Qualitative Analysis of Website Discourses
    Cashion, Margaret; Lucchesi, Nicholas; Patel, Kelsey; Roberts, Jonathan (Virginia Tech, 2014)
    US parents searching the Internet to inform themselves about childhood vaccination commonly encounter conflicting information. Typically, government agencies and medical organizations sponsor websites promoting vacccination, and advocacy groups sponsor vaccine-skeptical messages. In our study, we looked at a range of websites concerning vaccination and examined the appeals they used to address visitors, persuasive strategies, and dominant themes. We looked at the first step of the persuasive process, which is conveying messages to the public.
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    Vaccination Persuasion Online: A Qualitative Study of two Provaccine and two Vaccine Skeptical Websites
    Grant, Leonard Francis III; Hausman, Bernice L.; Cashion, Margaret; Lucchesi, Nicholas; Patel, Kelsey; Roberts, Jonathan (Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2015)
    Current concerns about vaccination resistance often cite the Internet as a source of vaccine controversy. Most academic studies of vaccine resistance online use quantitative methods to describe misinformation on vaccine-skeptical websites. Findings from these studies are useful for categorizing the generic features of these websites, but they do not provide insights into why these websites successfully persuade their viewers. To date, there have been few attempts to understand, qualitatively, the persuasive features of provaccine or vaccine-skeptical websites. The purpose of this research was to examine the persuasive features of provaccine and vaccine-skeptical websites. The qualitative analysis was conducted to generate hypotheses concerning what features of these websites are persuasive to people seeking information about vaccination and vaccine-related practices.