Making sense of vaccination policy in Austria

This project builds on earlier research funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, grant #M1477-G22, 2013-2016). Our earlier project showed that the difficult, gradual, and controversial introduction of the vaccination against Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a sexually transmitted virus that may cause different forms of cancer, led to a renewed policy discourse on vaccination in Austria (Paul 2016). This discourse, however, has been largely steered by experts and public campaigns that call for mass vaccination. This policy discourse tends to marginalize dissenting experts, such as feminists and critical health economists. Non-experts are typically assigned a passive role in the overall policy discourse, and no attempts have been made to include either parents or their childrens competencies in co-shaping the policy discourse. Based on this earlier, qualitative research where expert interviews and documents were our primary source (Paul 2016), we want to seize this opportunity to move away from the expert-led nature of the vaccination discourse in Austria in two ways: First, we do so by letting non-experts interpret statements made by expert institutions in a dataset of nearly 400 press releases regarding HPV vaccination. Second, we thus offer non-experts the opportunity to co-shape the debate. Citizen science offers the possibility to engage non-experts into the scientific process, to raise their understanding of scientific work and to carry out research that would otherwise not be possible. The aim of this project is thus both instrumental and experimental. Likewise, our research question is two-fold: How, and based on what arguments did expert institutions including public policy actors, scientists, and commercial actors - shape the policy discourse through media using press releases? To what extent and in what ways can citizen science be adopted in studying policy debates? In the proposed project, we will experiment with citizen science methodology by letting three groups of non-experts three cohorts of 16- year old high school students study a dataset of nearly 400 press releases issued between 2007, when the HPV vaccine was approved for use in Austria, and 2013, when it was introduced in the national immunization program (NIP). We do so by offering a web-based platform that is user-friendly and offers trained researchers the possibility to validate the students findings. Through this exercise, we seek to engage reflexively with our own research design, which has thus far relied on experts, too. For students, the proposed project offers the opportunity to acquire research skills, to engage with a policy topic of key importance, and to train their skills in observing and analyzing media content. With this research project, we thus seek to contribute simultaneously to our own research agenda regarding vaccination policy and to the growing interest in using citizen science beyond the natural sciences.

Vaccination policy is often marked by political tension and societal debate, and the vaccination against the sexually transmitted carcinogenic Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is a case in point. In this project, we invited 75 adolescents to analyze a dataset of nearly 400 press releases issued between 2007, when the HPV vaccine was approved for use in Austria, and 2013, when it was introduced in the national immunization program (NIP). The purpose of the research project was to trace the development of the media debate towards a major policy change and to involve what we consider untrained experts in the analysis of the debate. We did so by offering a web-based platform that is both user-friendly and offers trained researchers the possibility to validate the students findings. In line with these efforts, the project acronym is CODE IT! Collective Organization of Discourse Expertise using information technology. The scientific results confirm earlier findings (Paul 2016) and provide a detailed analysis of the emergence of HPV policy in Austria. In particular, the data allows a very detailed understanding of how the HPV vaccine was initially framed, or presented to be, a vaccine for girls only, and only later, and very gradually was reframed to be an essential vaccine for children, regardless of gender. The analysis further indicates that particularly public policy actors shied away from discussing sexuality and gender in their press materials, quite unlike the pharmaceutical industry. These findings are valuable insights for policymakers and political scientists alike, particularly in times where the introduction of new technologies is often seen to rely on the publics understanding of science, its impact and effects. Paul KT (2016) Saving lives: Adapting and adopting HPV vaccination in Austria. Social Science & Medicine 153:193-200. (open access)