Testing Risk Information Seeking and Avoidance in the Context of HPV Vaccination: A Comparison of Disease Risks and Vaccine-Related Risks

Abstract

This study investigates the procedures for risk information seeking and avoidance among South Korean female college students in the context of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination by adopting the Planned Risk Information Seeking Model (PRISM). Structural equation modeling and a percentile bootstrap method were employed to analyze the data. Several relationships hypothesized in PRISM were significant in the contexts of both HPV risk and vaccine-related risk. The extended PRISM with the outcome of avoidance intentions yielded results that were similar to the original PRISM regarding both HPV risk and vaccine risk. However, a few differences were found across contexts (i.e., HPV risk vs. vaccine risk) and model types (i.e., extended vs. nonextended). The findings have theoretical and practical implications for future research on the (extended) PRISM, which predicts both seeking intent and avoidance intentions in the context of vaccination.