Two doctoral students of COM, Yanqing SUN and Fangcao LU, earned 2nd place in this year’s Top Paper Competition in the division of Communicating Science, Health, Environment (COMSHER) at the annual meeting of Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Toronto, Canada for their paper “Users’ Responses to Public Discourse of HPV Vaccination on YouTube”. The study examines the relationship between characteristics of YouTube videos and audiences’ responses through a content analysis of 186 HPV vaccination-related videos and 4,087 viewers’ comments. They found that a substantial number of videos portrayed HPV vaccines in a negative tone. Almost half of the videos framed HPV vaccines as female-specific vaccines. Moreover, videos highlighting subjective norms of getting HPV vaccination received more positive comments and in contrast, videos displaying barriers acquired more unfavorable responses.
