Vaccine hesitancy is a significant impediment to global efforts to vaccinate against the SARS-CoV-2 virus at levels that generate herd immunity. In this article, we show the utility of an inductive approach - latent class analysis (LCA) - that allows us to characterize the size and nature of different vaccine attitude groups; and to compare how these groups differ across countries as well as across demographic subgroups within countries. We perform this analysis using original survey data collected in the US, UK, and Canada.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
April 2021
People form political attitudes to serve psychological needs. Recent research shows that some individuals have a strong desire to incite chaos when they perceive themselves to be marginalized by society. These individuals tend to see chaos as a way to invert the power structure and gain social status in the process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe acceptance of newcomers as either immigrants or asylum seekers has been a recurring issue in Australian politics. Both the size of Australia's intake of economic migrants and the resettlement of asylum seekers held offshore have been contentious political issues. Research in other immigrant-receiving countries has identified numerous factors shaping attitudes toward immigration and asylum policy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAntimicrobial resistance represents one of the world's most pressing public health problems. Governments around the world have-and will continue to-develop policy proposals to deal with this problem. However, the capacity of government will be constrained by very low levels of trust in government.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPublic Opin Q
January 2016
Illegal immigration is a contentious issue on the American policy agenda. To understand the sources of public attitudes toward immigration, social scientists have focused attention on political factors such as party identification; they have also drawn on theories of intergroup contact to argue that contact with immigrants shapes immigration attitudes. Absent direct measures, contextual measures such as respondents' ethnic milieu or proximity to salient geographic features (such as borders) have been used as proxies of contact.
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