Effects of source cues and storytelling on attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccination

Abstract

Guided by the Parasocial Interactions Framework and the Elaboration Likelihood Model, this study examined how source cues and storytelling occurring on social media could have an impact on someone’s attitude toward the COVID-19 vaccination. Specifically, the proposed study employed a 2 (source cue: non-health expertise vs. health expertise) x 2 (storytelling type: conversational vs. informational) between-subject factorial design experiment to test proposed hypotheses. A post-hoc analysis of an online experiment through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) with 311 participants revealed that participants with no COVID-19 vaccination relied on either expert or informational message tone to shape their attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination whereas participants with at least one COVID-19 vaccination valued the quality of information presented in the tweet regardless of cues presented. Implications for attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination are discussed.