Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Apr 26, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 24, 2020
Rhetorical appeals and tactics in New York Times comments about vaccines: A qualitative analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Improving persuasion tactics in response to vaccine skepticism is a longstanding problem. Elective nonvaccination emerging from skepticism about vaccine safety and efficacy jeopardizes local levels of herd immunity, exposing those who are most vulnerable to the risk of serious diseases.
Objective:
This article analyzes and taxonomizes pro-vaccine sentiments as a way of improving understanding about why existing persuasive approaches may be ineffective and offers insight into how existing methods might be improved.
Methods:
Quantitative analyses are used to measure word length and word usage across ~450,000 comments; qualitative thematic analyses are used to analyze themes in rhetorical appeals across anti- and pro-vaccine arguments.
Results:
Commenters wrote longer comments when discussing vaccines with respect to the entire dataset of comments. Appeals across 1101 anti- and pro-vaccine comments were similar, though these appeals diverged in tactics and conclusions. Pro-vaccine comments use rhetorical strategies that could be counterproductive to producing persuasion.
Conclusions:
Further study of pro-vaccine argumentation tactics could illuminate how persuasiveness could be expanded in online forums.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.