Monitoring Vaccination Discourse

Background: Public communication is both a driver of vaccine acceptance as well as a driver of hesitancy and refusal. Therefore, it is highly relevant to understand how the media report on it, how the topic is debated in politics and in realms of public health organizations, and how people talk about vaccination in public. However, what exactly is the discourse about vaccines and vaccination in Switzerland? The project is focused on vaccine hesitancy in the German speaking part of Switzerland. Patterns of communication about vaccination have emerged over time and influence how vaccination are communicated during the COVID-19 pandemic, today, and in the future. The project identifies how this discourse shape topics, positions, knowledge on and attitude towards vaccination, including vaccine acceptance and levels of hesitancy. Objectives & Approach: The overarching objectives are to model, analyze, and simulate the vaccination discourse to develop and establish an application for monitoring public communication on vaccination in German-speaking Switzerland, and, moreover, to deliver first monitoring results about actual debates in the years 2024-2025.More specifically, we identify how discourses shape knowledge and communicative practices on vaccination. Positions in vaccination discourses have emerged over time and influence how vaccines and vaccination are communicated today. Therefore, we want to understand how linguistic practices produce verbalized public attitudes (e.g., frames) about vaccines and immunization in different domains and on different levels of social communication. In addition, the project also analyses the meta-discourse. Within this project, the term meta-discourse refers to the discourse on the vaccination discourse, e.g., problematisation, reinterpretation, and appropriation of specific terms, claims of absences and silencing, comments on the reporting or the communication. To achieve an understanding of how linguistic practices produce verbalized public attitudes, data from a longer period of time are needed: The pattern of what is written about vaccination in 2023 is largely influenced by what was written about vaccination a few years ago. In addition, long-term data are needed to develop and test the monitoring approach.The project's originality lies in the meta-discourse analysis, as well as in the development of a prototype for monitoring vaccination discourse in Switzerland. It will transform advanced basic and applied oriented research into transdisciplinary impact.This is implemented in two steps:1. The analysis of vaccination (meta-)discourse in the German-speaking part of Switzerland is necessary to determine the dynamics of the discourse and the characteristics of the topic in the various sub-discourses of media, politics, health organizations, and online forums. This analysis serves as a basis for simulating discursive structures and diachronic dynamics over time. 2. The prototype of a web browser application for vaccination discourse monitoring builds on these results by successively transforming them into a product. The development of the application will meet the requirements of a scientific tool that can be used by practitioners of public health organizations.Data: (i) Journalistic media (SMD) 2000-2024, (ii) German-speaking health online forums (ca. 20010-2024), (iii) parliamentary debates (parliamentary transcripts, Official Bulletin of the Swiss Parliament, 2000-2024), (iv) websites of public health organizations in Switzerland (200-2).Expected results and Impact:1. Basic and applied-oriented research: Corpus-centered discourse analysis with triangulated data and methods with an innovative approach to meta-discursive statements linguistic discourse analysis that allows the simulation of discourse networks arising out of realms of media, politics, public health, and lay communication. This enables to:2. Application-oriented research: Development of a prototype for monitoring vaccination discourse in Switzerland for simulating, i.e., a model-based procedure for determining preconditions for action in public discourse for pragmatic purposes. This leads to:3. Transdisciplinary outreach: Acquainting practitioners of the application to monitor, which can be used by public health organizations, NGOs, the Swiss national immunization program, and health care providers when designing communication aimed to improve addressing people (outreach).