Educated and Less Educated Caregivers: A Study on Cervical Cancer

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There’s a disease called cervical cancer, and it can seriously harm women.

A vaccine called HPV helps protect girls from getting it when they grow up. In Nigeria, some adolescent girls are receiving this vaccine, but not all.

I just finished reading a recently published study on awareness, misinformation, and uptake of the HPV vaccine in Nigeria. The researchers, Sohail Agha & Ifeanyi Nsofor, sampled three states: Abuja, Adamawa, and Nassarawa.

The findings were interesting.

Caregivers with little or no schooling were more likely to see HPV vaccine ads online and were more likely to vaccinate their daughters. For instance, almost 9 out of 10 girls whose caregivers had no schooling received the vaccine.

On the other hand, more educated caregivers - those with college or postgraduate degrees — were less likely to see the ads and less likely to vaccinate their girls. Only about 4 out of 10 girls with postgraduate caregivers got the vaccine.

Normally, you’d expect those with more schooling to be quicker to accept health advice. But here, the opposite happened.

The study suggests that more educated caregivers may be more skeptical of vaccine messages — and perhaps, even more exposed to misinformation about it online.

Personally, I am not surprised. I have seen, firsthand, a massive and voluntary acceptance of this vaccine in remote communities with limited access to education and the internet, compared to urban areas with more educated people and greater access to the internet.

Additionally, those familiar with communication theories may recall the Knowledge Gap Theory. This was what rang in my head while I was reading the findings of this research work.

Knowledge Gap theory argues that when new information is introduced, often through mass media, people with higher education and socioeconomic status usually acquire it faster than those with lower status, thereby widening the knowledge gap between groups.

What’s interesting in this HPV vaccine study is that the reverse seems to be happening: less educated caregivers were more exposed to vaccine messages online and more likely to act on them, while more educated ones were less likely.

Although one may argue this flip still connects to the theory, it still shows how access, trust, and interpretation of information can complicate an “expected” pattern. Here, misinformation among the educated may be closing or even inverting the usual knowledge gap. This is really interesting.

Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/djBjinFS