JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Health literacy involves individuals’ knowledge, personal skills, confidence to take action, to evaluate, appraise health-related information and to improve their health and/or that of their community.

Objective:

This study aimed to analyze the association between health literacy and attitude towards vaccines.

Methods:

We used the SLAVACO Wave 3 – SESSTIM, a survey conducted in December 2021 among a sample of 2,022 individuals, representative of the French adult population. We investigated factors associated with the attitude towards vaccines using respondents’ different socio-demographic data, health literacy levels and the health system confidence levels using a multivariate logistic regression analysis.

Results:

Among the participants, 21.8% were classified as “distrustful of vaccines in general”, 36.1% were “selectively hesitant” and 42.2% were “non-hesitant”. In our model, level of health literacy was not statistically different between the “distrustful of vaccines” and the “selectively hesitant” (P=.5), but it was associated with being a “non-hesitant” (aOR=1.86, P=.003). The confidence in the health system was a strong predictor for a “non-hesitant” attitude towards vaccines (aOR=12.4, P<.001). We found a positive correlation of 0.34 (P<.001) between health literacy and confidence in the health system, but the interaction term between health literacy and health system confidence was not significant in our model.

Conclusions:

Health literacy was associated with a “non-hesitant” attitude towards vaccines. The findings demonstrated that health literacy and confidence in the health system are modestly correlated. Therefore, to tackle the subject of vaccine hesitancy, the main focus should be on increasing the population confidence and also on increasing their health literacy levels or providing vaccine information addressing the needs of less literate citizens.