Narrative Messages, Information Seeking and COVID-19 Vaccine Intention: The Moderating Role of Perceived Behavioral Control

PURPOSE: The main purposes of the current study are to examine 1) the influence of narrative vs statistics messages on COVID-19 related information seeking and COVID-19 vaccine intention and 2) the moderating role of perceived behavioral control (PBC). DESIGN: Data for a between-subject randomized experiment were collected online. The manipulation messages were presented as screenshots from the CDC’s Facebook page. SETTING: The participants were recruited from Amazon MTurk. SUBJECTS: A total of 300 subjects participated in the study, who were 18 years and above (M = 38.40). MEASURES: Intention to seek information, COVID-19 vaccine intention, and PBC. ANALYSIS: To test the hypotheses, we utilized Hayes’s (2014) PROCESS for SPSS (Model 1). For intention to seek information, the main effect of the message manipulation (narrative vs statistics) [b = −2.10, t (300) = −4.14, P < .001] and the interaction [b = .41, t (300) = 3.88, P < .001] were significant. For vaccine intention, the main effects of message manipulation [b = 1.64, t (300) = −2.61, P < .005] and the interaction [b = .34, t (300) = 2.64, P < .005] were significant. RESULTS: Our research found that narrative messages were more persuasive for both information seeking and vaccine intention. But this was true only in the case of individuals whose PBC was low. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings have critical implications for vaccine promotion research