Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Jan 31, 2022
Date Accepted: Mar 5, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Mar 5, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Adult Vaccine Hesitancy Scale in Arabic and French: Protocol for the translation and validation in the WHO EMRO region
ABSTRACT
Background:
The world as we know it changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Hope has emerged with the development of new vaccines against the disease. However, many factors hinder vaccine uptake and lead to vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine hesitancy (VH) is defined as the “refusal or delay of the uptake of vaccines despite the availability of services”. Understanding the factors affecting vaccine hesitancy and how to assess its prevalence has become an imperative amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. The WHO SAGE Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy developed a ten-item Vaccine Hesitancy Scale (VHS) widely used in different countries and settings. The VHS has been modified to the adult VHS (aVHS) and validated. The aVHS is a 10-item scale with a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, no available aVHS have been designed or validated in Arabic or French.
Objective:
This research aims to translate the aVHS from its original English language to Arabic and French and validate the translations in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean region.
Methods:
The study will follow a cross-sectional design divided into five phases inspired by the methodology proposed in the “Guidelines for developing, translating, and validating a questionnaire in perioperative and pain medicine.”
Results:
As of January 2022, the scale has been translated to Arabic and French and is undergoing the process of back translation. All data collection tools have been prepared (i.e., Socio-demographics, vaccination status and open-ended questions) and are ready to go into their electronic formats. Three stages of data collection and analysis are identified in this project. We expect to reach the desired sample size in this phase (2,000 participants) by June 2022. Any work resulting from this project will be disseminated nationally and internationally through submission to academic journals and international conferences.
Conclusions:
This study will provide researchers with a validated tool to assess adult vaccine hesitancy within populations that speak Arabic and/or French and provide a roadmap on how to scale translation and ensure cross-cultural adaptation. We aim at supporting our approach with statistical evidence.
Citation
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