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To measure adolescent girls’ preferences over features of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines in order to provide quantitative estimates of the perceived benefits of vaccination and potential vaccine uptake.

A discrete choice experiment (DCE) survey was developed to measure adolescent girls’ preferences over features of HPV vaccines. The survey was fielded to a U.S. sample of 307 girls aged 13–17 years who had not yet received an HPV vaccine in June 2008.

In a latent class logit model, two distinct groups were identified – one with strong preferences against vaccination which largely did not differentiate between vaccine features, and another that was receptive to vaccination and had well-defined preferences over vaccine features. Based on the mean estimates over the entire sample, we estimate that girls’ valuation of bivalent and quadrivalent HPV vaccines ranged between $400 and $460 in 2008, measured as willingness-to-pay (WTP). The additional value of genital warts protection was $145, although cervical cancer efficacy was the most preferred feature. We estimate maximum uptake of 54–65%, close to the 53% reported for one dose in 2011 surveillance data, but higher than the 35% for three doses in surveillance data.

We conclude that adolescent girls do form clear opinions and some place significant value on HPV vaccination, making research on their preferences vital to understanding the determinants of HPV vaccine demand.

DCE studies may be used to design more effective vaccine-promotion programs and for reassessing public health recommendations and guidelines as new vaccines are made available.

Cervical cancer (CxCa) incidence and mortality remain unacceptably high in South Carolina, USA, presenting an ideal opportunity for intervention. To address this need, Cervical Cancer-Free South Carolina developed an academic-community partnership with researchers and students at a public university to design, implement, and evaluate a theory-based CxCa communication campaign, It’s My Time. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The goal of this campaign was to decrease CxCa by increasing human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and appropriate screening. This paper describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a successful theory-based CxCa prevention communication campaign for college women based on formative audience research and targeted messages delivered to audience segments through new and traditional communication channels. The health belief model (HBM) served as a theoretical framework for the campaign throughout development, implementation, and evaluation.

This campaign demonstrated the effectiveness of the HBM to address CxCa prevention, including HPV vaccine acceptability. The campaign aimed to increase perceptions of susceptibility, which were low, by emphasizing that HPV is a sexually transmitted infection. A community-based grassroots approach to addressing disparities in CxCa prevention increased benefits and decreased barriers. Social media emerged as a particularly appropriate platform to disseminate cues to action. In total, 60 percent of participants who responded to an anonymous web-based survey evaluation indicated that they received the HPV vaccine as a result of campaign messages.

This paper offers practical suggestions to campaign planners about building academic-community partnerships to develop theory-based communication campaigns that include conducting formative research, segmenting target audiences, engaging with young people, and incorporating social media.

The aim of this small‐scale focus group study is to explore the impact the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine has on attitudes towards HPV, cervical cancer and sexual risk taking amongst university students in the UK.

Participants were recruited through advertisements placed on notice boards throughout the campus of the University of Leeds. The study sampled purposively to obtain two groups of ten men and two groups of ten women. A total of 34 people attended the sessions. The missing participants gave no reason for the absence. Those who agreed to take part were aged 19‐24 and were from a range of academic courses. Ethical approval was sought and approved by the Medical School Ethics Committee at the University of Leeds.

Participants saw HPV as being distinct from genital warts. This led to a duality in their view of the vaccine, which they saw as a cancer vaccine for schoolgirls and as an STI vaccine in relation to people of their own age, and thus believed it would cause sexual complacency among young adults. There was a fear that the HPV vaccine would reinforce gender bias, reinforcing the idea that females are responsible for sexual health. They maintained that mass media campaigns were more effective than sex education for improving sexual health knowledge and practices.

With the exception of chlamydia screening, this age group tends to be ignored in sexual health promotion campaigns. This small‐scale study provides insights that can inform larger studies and help tailor future health education campaigns on HPV for this audience.

Purpose – To provide an overview of racial/ethnic disparities in human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, HPV vaccination, and cervical cancer on domestic and international levels.

Design/methodology/approach – The literature, cervical cancer prevention guidelines, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention resources were culled to aggregate information on epidemiology, racial/ethnic disparities, and knowledge and attitudes related to HPV, HPV vaccination, and cervical cancer. Original data supplement information about HPV and HPV vaccination knowledge and attitudes.

Findings – Cervical cancer is among the leading causes of female death worldwide, with substantial racial/ethnic and geographic disparities. In the United States, African American and Hispanic women suffer disproportionate cervical cancer incidence and mortality compared to their Caucasian counterparts. Globally, the greatest burden of cervical cancer (and HPV infection) is shouldered by developing regions. Prevention efforts, such as HPV vaccination and adaption of screening programs to resource-poor areas, have the potential to reduce such disparities, but cultural context is critical to successful development and implementation of such interventions.

Research limitations/implications – As this is not a systematic review, but rather a viewpoint on issues related to disparities in cervical cancer, the literature review is not exhaustive.

Practical implications – This chapter provides a context for examining cervical cancer disparities domestically and globally and serves as a starting point for formulating future research.

Originality – This perspective on HPV and cervical cancer presents disparities both within the United States and worldwide. The chapter supplements the literature with new data that provide additional insight into knowledge and attitudes about these health issues.

Effectiveness of message tactics in social marketing projects often varies across groups of individuals, which suggests the importance of tailoring communication approaches to maximize the success of promotional strategies. This study aims to contribute in this direction by using an innovative approach to promote targeted human papillomavirus vaccination, applying conjoint analysis to understand parental preferences for social media content features.

An online purpose-built quantitative survey was administered to a group of parents meeting eligibility criteria. The survey questions were designed based on inputs from formative qualitative research conducted in a previous phase of the study.

In the overall sample of 285 parents, responses show that image was the most important feature of social media posts overall, followed by source and text. Cluster analysis identified eight segments in the sample based on parental preferences for content features. Significant differences across segments were identified in terms of need for cognition, vaccine hesitancy, parental gender, concerns around side effects, trust in medical providers, information sharing behaviors on social media and information seeking online.

The application of conjoint analysis to promotional content allows to assess which features of the content are most important in persuading different individuals and provide insights on how people process the information, ultimately to inform targeted promotion based on preferences. Conjoint analysis has been widely used in consumer research to explore audience preferences for products or services, but only a few applications of conjoint analysis to the design and testing of promotional content are found in the literature.

The purpose of this research is to investigate how parents and caregivers describe their concerns about the HPV vaccine for their children on open Internet websites. The study examines what the discourse among parents reveals about their concerns regarding the HPV vaccine.

Our exploratory study utilized a grounded theory approach as a method of collecting data and simultaneously formulating research questions based on emerging themes from the data. We used purposeful sampling to select sets of comments posted on websites that provided news, scientific information, or parental support regarding HPV and its vaccine.

Findings suggest support for Bond and Nolan’s (2011) theory that familiarity with a disease is central to parents’ assessment of risk, and that dread of a serious disease such as cervical cancer is weaker than dread of unknown possible side effects in parents’ motivation to give or withhold the vaccine for their children.

Research limitations include our usage of a purposeful convenience sample of websites. The limitation of this sampling technique is that the comments made by website “users” and used in the analysis may not be representative of the wider population, and may include Americans as well as non-Americans.

Our research fills an important gap in the literature by looking at the ways in which parents share their concerns about the HPV vaccine on Internet websites as they consider whether to reject, delay, or consent to the vaccine.

Although Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is the most commonly diagnosed sexually transmitted infection in the USA, much controversy exists with respect to HPV vaccination, especially among parents of adolescents. Previous research has shown that exemplars in the media influence public opinion estimates about controversial social issues. However, little is known about the underlying psychological processes of how exemplars influence public opinion formation. The purpose of this paper is to systematically explore such psychological processes based on the projection theory. To this end, the important yet controversial public health issue, the mandatory HPV vaccination, was chosen.

A two-factor (exemplar vs proportion), between-subject experiment was conducted using online newspaper articles as main stimuli. A total of 138 participants completed the study. The analytical framework comprised the Sobel test with the Bootstrap method and a series of Ordinary Least Square hierarchical regression analyses.

The higher the proportion of exemplars against the HPV vaccination in a news article was, the greater the number of individuals who became opposed to it was. And the high personal opposition translated into negative public opinion change estimation.

The findings indicate that news exemplars may influence individuals’ personal opinion formation, and, in turn, contribute to their estimations of future public opinion climate, as suggested by the projection theory. Theoretical, methodological and practical implications for journalists, health educators and policy makers are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to define the role non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play across the vaccine development and delivery spectrum within the vaccine enterprise. As demonstrated in this paper, NGOs can play a critical role in prioritizing and accelerating the development and introduction of new vaccines against diseases that disproportionally burden children, women, and communities in the poorest countries around the world.

The author has used case studies from decades of work by PATH, an international NGO, to help develop and implement vaccines, to illustrate the roles of NGOs can play during each of the stages along the development and delivery spectrum.

There are four key considerations that can help determine the ability of a given vaccine to be introduced and scaled within a health system: accessibility, affordability, acceptability, and availability. As more vaccine candidates are identified and move along the development and delivery pathway, there will be increased demand for NGOs to continue playing a pivotal role to address these considerations.

This paper aims to highlight a few of the lessons learned from PATH's four decades of experience in the hope they will contribute and be applied to the evolving environment of vaccine enterprise.