NWO Mosaic 2.0 grant

Grant for the project "Applying a Gender Perspective to Ethnic Differences in HPV Vaccination Uptake in the Netherlands (GETVACCINL)"
Principal investigator: Enise Çayci, M.Sc.
Co-investigators: Dr. Thijs van den Broek & Prof. dr. Anna Petra Nieboer

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a sexually transmitted virus that can lead to cancer in both women and men. In Europe, the incidence of HPV-related cancers is notably higher among people with a non-Western migration background than among native Europeans without a migration background. Vaccination programs’ potential to mitigate such ethnic disparities is undermined by suboptimal vaccination rates among people with a non-Western migration background. In the Netherlands, HPV-vaccination uptake is particularly low among people of Turkish and Moroccan origin. The reasons for the hesitancy towards vaccination in these groups are not well-understood yet, hampering development of successful campaigns to address ethnic HPV-vaccination disparities.
This project will extend the state-of-the-art by:
(i) going beyond mere description of ethnic differences in HPV-vaccination uptake in the Netherlands and providing insights into what shapes these differences.
(ii) adopting a gender perspective recognizing that drivers of ethnic differences in people’s inclination to vaccinate their daughters and their sons, respectively, may differ.
(iii) generating an initial evidence base for tailored, gender-specific health promotion campaigns to reduce ethnic differences in HPV-vaccination uptake.
The project consists of two complementary stages. In the exploratory stage, a small-scale data collection will provide insights into parents’ multifaceted stances towards HPV-vaccination and their thoughts on how other parents make these decisions. In the second stage, a larger quantitative survey will allow testing hypotheses partly based on findings from the first stage. Decomposition techniques will determine drivers of differences between parents of Turkish and Moroccan origin and native Dutch parents without a migration background in the extent to which they vaccinate their children against HPV, and help assess whether these drivers differ for HPV-vaccination of daughters versus sons. A unique survey experiment will evaluate how campaigns encouraging HPV-vaccination can best be tailored, potentially in gender-specific ways, towards parents of Turkish and Moroccan origin.