Understanding vaccine skepticism: A cultural-sociological multi-method study on perspectives regarding the Dutch National Immunization Programme

To explain why an increasing number of parents choose not to vaccinate their children, it is often assumed that the scientific consensus on how vaccinations work is universally shared, and that non-vaccination can be attributed to ‘misunderstandings’ that can (and should) be corrected. This assumption overlooks how skeptics themselves view vaccinations. Therefore, this dissertation takes the viewpoint of individuals as a starting point to uncover the underlying perspectives that shape vaccine skepticism in the Netherlands. This cultural-sociological approach demonstrates that theoretically educated parents who are skeptical about childhood vaccinations tend to employ an individualistic approach to truth-seeking: they rely on their own judgment of what constitutes ‘true’ knowledge rather than unquestioningly following advice from institutions such as the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). This translated into vaccine skepticism in two distinct ways. While some parents adopted a nature-oriented perspective, emphasizing intuition and favoring the most natural approach, others embraced a science-oriented perspective, regarding scientific methods as crucial and using their affinity with these methods to critically interrogate scientific consensus. These perspectives were found to shape how parents experienced health-related events and their subsequent trajectories of vaccine skepticism. Furthermore, the perspectives individuals adopted influenced how they responded to information about vaccinations. For instance, providing information on scientific research concerning the MMR vaccine had a negative effect on support for the vaccine among individuals with a less science-oriented perspective—a group that is often the primary target of information campaigns.