Elsevier

Public Health

Volume 129, Issue 12, December 2015, Pages 1553-1562
Public Health

Original Research
Who is sceptical about emerging public health threats? Results from 39 national surveys in the United Kingdom

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2015.09.004Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Data from 39 UK telephone surveys conducted during the ‘swine flu’ pandemic were analysed (n = 42,420).

  • Scepticism was assessed by asking whether participants agreed that ‘too much fuss is being made about the risk of swine flu.’

  • Around half of respondents were sceptical about the risk of swine flu (55.1%).

  • Scepticism was associated with being white, healthy and male, and having high subjective knowledge about the outbreak.

  • Challenging perceived knowledge may improve communication with sceptical groups in future.

Abstract

Objectives

Members of the public are often sceptical about warnings of an impending public health crisis. Breaking through this scepticism is important if we are to convince people to take urgent protective action. In this paper we explored correlates of perceiving that ‘too much fuss’ was being made about the 2009/10 influenza A H1N1v (‘swine flu’) pandemic.

Study design

A secondary analysis of data from 39 nationally representative telephone surveys conducted in the UK during the pandemic.

Methods

Each cross-sectional survey (combined n = 42,420) collected data over a three day period and asked participants to state whether they agreed or disagreed that ‘too much fuss is being made about the risk of swine flu.’

Results

Overall, 55.1% of people agreed or strongly agreed with this sentiment. Perceiving that too much fuss was being made was associated with: being male, being white, being generally healthy, trusting most in a primary care physician to provide advice, not knowing someone who had contracted the illness, believing you know a lot about the outbreak, not wishing to receive additional information about the outbreak and possessing worse factual knowledge about the outbreak than other people.

Conclusions

In future disease outbreaks merely providing factual information is unlikely to engage people who are sceptical about the need to take action. Instead, messages which challenge their perceived knowledge and which present case studies of people who have been affected may prove more effective, especially when delivered through trusted channels.

Keywords

Pandemic
Scepticism
Communication
Psychology
Influenza

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