Understanding change in COVID-19 vaccination intention with network analysis of longitudinal data from Dutch adults

Prior research into the relationship between attitudes and vaccination intention is predominantly cross-sectional and therefore does not provide insight into directions of relations. During the COVID-19 vaccines development and enrollment phase, we studied the temporal dynamics of COVID-19 vaccination intention in relation to attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines and the pandemic, vaccination in general, social norms and trust. The data are derived from a longitudinal survey study with Dutch participants from a research panel (N = 744; six measurements between December 2020 and May 2021; age 18–84 years [M = 53.32]) and analyzed with vector-autoregression network analyses. While cross-sectional results indicated that vaccination intention was relatively strongly related to attitudes toward the vaccines, results from temporal analyses showed that vaccination intention mainly predicted other vaccination-related variables and to a lesser extent was predicted by variables. We found a weak predictive effect from social norm to vaccination intention that was not robust. This study underlines the challenge of stimulating uptake of new vaccines developed during pandemics, and the importance of examining directions of effects in research into vaccination intention.