Romanian Parents' Social Representations of Children's Vaccination

The current research aimed to explore Romanian parents’ social representations of vaccination in children and to identify how they fluctuate across gender and degree of reliance on information regarding this practice learned from media and, respectively, medical experts. The first study was conducted on a sample of 80 mothers and fathers of children who were supposed to receive the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) later that year. The analysis of the data gathered upon the completion of the Associative Network Task (de Rosa, 2002) revealed that the nucleus of the social representation of vaccination comprised the evocations health, conspiracy and immunization, revealing a positive valence of this representation. The second study was conducted on another sample of 80 parents with the same characteristics as the previous sample and revealed that fathers had significantly more positive social representations of vaccination as compared to mothers, and that participants who relied more on doctors as a source of information on vaccination were significantly more likely to have more positive representations as compared to those who did not. In addition to this, parents who relied more on media sources had more negative representations of vaccination. Results are discussed in the light of their contribution to the social representations theory and of their implications for comprehending Romanians’ motivations for adopting or rejecting this practice.