Abstract:

Introduction: Vaccines are the most effective prevention tools to eliminate or significantly decrease the incidence of many prevalent vaccine-preventable diseases (VPDs). Risk factors associated with parents’ child immunization hesitancy constituted a major difficulty to routine immunization program to prevent and control infant VPDs. Earlier, we reported that parents’ risk perception of infancy vaccination doubtfulness was remarkable after proper evidence-based information, parental infant immunization indecision risks perception translation to strong-willed early-days immunization behaviors remains unsubstantiated.

Methods: We used cross-sectional research method with pilot tested behavioral theories-informed tool to judge whether the observed parental infancy immunization risk acuity actually transformed into risk avoidance to vaccinate their children.

Results: The results of this study (N = 359) showed that all respondents had significant awareness of childhood immunization. Among the respondents, 95% reported high school and above education levels and 54% gainfully employed. After correction for confounding with multivariable logistic regression analysis, study participants that had good risk perception were 4 times as likely to vaccinate their children compared with participants with poor perception, adjusted POR (APOR) = 4.05, CI = 1.12 – 14.73.

Conclusions: The activities of public health professionals empowered parents to progressively perceive and avoid childhood vaccination risks relevant to healthier children. The findings from this study have far-reaching implications for broad beneficial and effective infant morbidity and mortality reduction. Addressing parents’ specific questions and concerns adequately helped make more informed choices to improve complete wellbeing.

Keywords: Parental childhood vaccination hesitancy; effective risk-benefit communication; information seeking/processing; risk perception, Protection motivation; risk avoidance.

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