Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics (Dec 2021)

The Youth Attitudes about Vaccines (YAV-5) scale: adapting the parent attitudes about childhood vaccines short scale for use with youth in German, French, and Italian in Switzerland, exploratory factor analysis and mokken scaling analysis

  • Victoria O. Olarewaju,
  • Kristen Jafflin,
  • Michael J. Deml,
  • Nejla Gültekin,
  • Franco Muggli,
  • Susanna Schärli,
  • Catherine Gruillot,
  • Andrea Kloetzer,
  • Benedikt M. Huber,
  • Sonja Merten,
  • Philip E. Tarr

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2021.1980314
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 17, no. 12
pp. 5183 – 5190

Abstract

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No validated measures of vaccine hesitancy (VH) for youth vaccination currently exist. We adapted the Parent Attitudes about Childhood Vaccines survey (PACV-15) for use in youth to create the version Youth Attitudes about Vaccines survey (YAV-14 and YAV-5), then translated it into three languages (German, French, and Italian). We administered the YAV-14 to 1,003 youth aged 15–26 years in Switzerland. We used exploratory factor analysis and Mokken scale analysis to explore the psychometric properties, Cronbach’s alpha to investigate the reliability for the YAV-14 and the YAV-5, but we only report results of the YAV-5 analysis here. We determined construct validity by logistic regression of the association between youth VH as measured by the YAV-5 and non-receipt of the first human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine dose. EFA produced a single scale in German and French while two factors were obtained in Italian. All language versions fit the Mokken scale models with medium-scale strength. There was a significant association between VH and HPV vaccine non-receipt for the full sample (odds ratio (OR); 1.93, 95% confidence interval (CI); 1.31–2.85). Language-stratified analyses found a significant association between VH and non-immunization in the German-language sample. Our results demonstrate that the German version of YAV-5 is a valid and reliable scale for identifying vaccine hesitant youth regardless of sex, and the French version is a valid and reliable scale for identifying vaccine hesitant female youth. Further validation is needed for Italian and French-speaking male youth.

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