The global vaccination efforts and progress against infectious diseases are met with serious challenges, one of which is the increased scepticism about vaccines and the necessity to vaccinate. WHO (World Health Organization) calls this scepticism 'vaccine hesitancy', defining it as delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccination services.
Aim
To understand the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, a currently very sensitive and dividing issue in Latvian society, it is necessary not only to find out separate vaccine-related decisions, arguments and the psychological mechanisms at play, but also to understand the broader context of the human embodied life, in which the decisions, arguments and psychological mechanisms accepted, evaluated and implemented. The aim of this interdisciplinary research project is to provide new knowledge about the embodied experience of vaccine hesitancy, in the context of which people’s decisions to not go through with vaccination or to delay it can be better understood.
Methodology
To reach the project’s goal concepts and distinctions from phenomenology (especially the phenomenology of medicine) by conducting a phenomenologically informed empirical research study. Simply put, phenomenology is a philosophical movement, the aim of which is to describe experience and its structures. However, the field of the phenomenological research is not limited to subjective states or processes, because in phenomenology the world and everything that is objective cannot be imagined without the subject that experiences it. The world and everything that is objective reveals itself to us in experience, and as such is a part of the subjective life. Therefore, the interest of phenomenology extends to the world and objective things and events as they appear to us in our experience.
One of the peculiarities of our everyday experience is our embodiment (Leiblichkeit). Phenomenology rejects Cartesian mind-body dualism that separates the mind as a psychological existence from the body as a physical existence. The mind is embodied and the body is minded, consituting what in the phenomenological philosophy is called the lived body (Leib) . In other words, embodiment expresses the idea of the lived body which means that the body is not just an object, something which we possess, but also a principle of experience which lets the world and ourselves to appear. It is through our lived body that we live, interact with, and experience ourselves, the world and other people. Taking into account the significance of the body in our lives and in the way we experience ourselves, others and the world, a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy requires an investigation into the context of embodied experience in which the decisions to vaccinate or not are made.
Planned results
The project will create innovative knowledge in medical humanities that will give a phenomenologically informed insight into the embodied motivations for vaccine hesitancy, will improve communication on behalf of health care professionals, national health authorities and government representatives with the public, and will inform future research. The results of the research project will be disseminated to academics and end-users (public health and health care professionals, as well as government representatives) in the form of 9 open access scientific articles, participation in international conferences in Latvia and abroad with 25 presentation, 2 articles in popular magazines, and a recommendation report and a video material containing recommendations for the communication with persons hesitant to vaccinate.
Project implementer and research team
Projektu īsteno Latvijas Universitātes (LU) Filozofijas un socioloģijas institūts (FSI). Projekta vadītājs Dr. phil. Uldis Vēgners, vadošie pētnieki Dr. habil. Phil. Maija Kūle un Dr. phil. Māra Grīnfelde, pētnieki Dr. phil. Andrejs Balodis un Dr. philol. Marija Semjonova-Reinholde (2022-2023), un eksperti Tomass Stepiņš un Daniela Zālīte (2024).
Implementation period
01/01/2022 - 31/12/2024
Funding
The project (project No lzp-2021/1-0360) is funded by the Latvian Council of Sciences in the framework of the program Fundamental and applied research projects.