Parental Attitude to Vaccination of Children: Case of the Social Network VKontakte

This paper analyzes what attitude to vaccination prevails in the RIA-Novosti online community on the social network VKontakte, as well as what factors are responsible for negative and positive attitudes towards vaccination. In terms of the asymmetry of information about vaccination and the availability of inaccurate data, it is important to look at how relevant to vaccination on the Internet and social networks is, where the phenomenon of anti-vaccination skepticism is fixed. The dataset is the comments under the posts in the community, which were obtained by the method of parsing. Data analysis was carried out using two methods - the categorical method of principal components (CatPCA) and the multiple correspondence analysis (Multiple Correspondence Analysis). As a result of the data analysis, it turned out that positive factors regarding vaccination prevail in the RIA-Novosti community on the social network VKontakte, that is, most commentators are loyal to vaccinations. With meaningful interpretation, it turned out that positive attitudes are expressed in fear of negative consequences due to the lack of vaccination — these are outbreaks of infections, a decrease in collective immunity. Proponents of vaccination would like to solve the problem with vaccination refusals to ensure greater safety. And negative attitudes towards vaccination are influenced by someone else’s negative experience, fear of complications, lack of guarantees of the procedure and its control, as well as the obligation to bear full responsibility for the decision made