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Title: Social and cultural construction processes involved in HPV vaccine hesitancy among Chinese women : a qualitative study
Authors: Siu, JYm 
Fung, TKF
Leung, LHm 
Issue Date: 2019
Source: International journal for equity in health, 18 Sept. 2019, v. 18, 147, p. 1-18
Abstract: Background: HPV vaccine is a prophylactic vaccine to prevent HPV infections. Recommended by the World Health Organization, this vaccine is clinically proven to be one of the most effective preventive measures against the prevalence of cervical cancer and other HPV-associated cancers and chronic genital conditions. However, its uptake rate among women in Hong Kong is insignificant-only approximately 2.9% adolescent girls and 9.7% female university students received HPV vaccination in 2014. With the notion of Critical Medical Anthropology, we aimed to identify if different influential factors, ranging from individual, societal, and cultural, are involved in the decision-making process of whether to receive HPV vaccination.
Methods: We adopted a qualitative approach and conducted in-depth individual semistructured interviews with 40 women in Hong Kong between May and August 2017.
Results: We noted that the following factors intertwined to influence the decision-making process: perceptions of HPV and HPV vaccine; perceived worthiness of HPV vaccines, which was in turn influenced by vaccine cost, marriage plans, and experiences of sexual activities; history of experiencing gynecological conditions, stigma associated with HPV vaccination, acquisition of information on HPV vaccines, distrust on HPV vaccines, and absence of preventive care in the healthcare practice.
Conclusions: HPV vaccination is promoted in a manner that is "feminized" and "moralized" under the patriarchal value system, further imposing the burden of disease on women, and leading to health inequality of women in pursuing the vaccination as a preventive health behaviour as a result. We believe that this ultimately results in an incomplete understanding of HPV, consequently influencing the decision-making process. The "mixed-economy" medical system adopting capitalist logic also molds a weak doctor-patient relationship, leading to distrust in private practice medical system, which affects the accessibility of information regarding HPV vaccination for participants to make the decision.
Keywords: Human papillomavirus
HPV vaccination
Vaccine hesitancy
Decision making process
Women
Chinese
Publisher: BioMed Central
Journal: International journal for equity in health 
ISSN: 1475-9276
DOI: 10.1186/s12939-019-1052-9
Rights: © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
The following publication Siu, J.Y., Fung, T.K.F. & Leung, L.H. Social and cultural construction processes involved in HPV vaccine hesitancy among Chinese women: a qualitative study. Int J Equity Health 18, 147 (2019), 1-18 is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12939-019-1052-9
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