Željko Pavić, Marina Đukić, Adrijana Šuljok: AGE DIFFERENCES IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEDIA USE AND ATTITUDES ABOUT VACCINATION
Scientific paper
Željko Pavić, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek
Marina Đukić, Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek
Adrijana Šuljok, Institute for Social Research in Zagreb
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59014/XOVK8590
Keywords:
age, Internet, media, social media, vaccination
Abstract
Theoretical approaches that analyze media effects can be divided into
those which state that the impact is real, comprehensive and one-way, and
those which state that there is a reversed causality, i.e. that values, characteristics
and attitudes affect the way the media are used. In this paper,
these approaches were developed on the example of the attitudes towards
vaccination, a topic that has become an extremely important social and
public health issue with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The
authors analyzed the data collected in a pilot study on attitudes towards
vaccination conducted before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on
a convenience online sample of the Croatian population (N = 822). The
results of the research study showed the lack of influence of television and
the limited and uneven influence of the use of the Internet and Internet
social networking sites on attitudes towards vaccination, i.e. on conspiracy
beliefs in the field of vaccination. Namely, the research results revealed
negative correlation between the Internet and SNSs use and conspiracy
beliefs, which probably flows from the impact of social integration or
the prevailing positive information that can be found about vaccination
online. Furthermore, age was proven to be a significant moderator variable,
given that the negative correlation between time spent online and
conspiracy beliefs is much stronger among younger people, and the moderating
impact of time spent on social media moved to the opposite direction.
The results of the research therefore indicate a need to better understand
the use of old and new media, their communicative differences, age
differences in their use, and other background variables that can lead to
unequal influences of the media on different social groups.
Copyright (c) 2023 European Realities – Power
This paper is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.