- Title
- Examining word association networks: a cross-country comparison of women's perceptions of HPV testing and vaccination
- Creator
- Schmid, Bernd C.; Carlson, Jamie; Rezniczek, Günther A.; Wyllie, Jessica; Jaaback, Kenneth; Vencovsky, Filip
- Relation
- PLoS ONE Vol. 12, Issue 10, no. e0185669
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185669
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- In this study, we examined the perceptual associations women hold with regard to cervical cancer testing and vaccination across two countries, the U.S. and Australia. In a large-scale online survey, we presented participants with 'trigger' words, and asked them to state sequentially other words that came to mind. We used this data to construct detailed term co-occurrence network graphs, which we analyzed using basic topological ranking techniques. The results showed that women hold divergent perceptual associations regarding trigger words relating to cervical cancer screening tools, i.e. human papillomavirus (HPV) testing and vaccination, which indicate health knowledge deficiencies with non-HPV related associations emerging from the data. This result was found to be consistent across the country groups studied. Our findings are critical in optimizing consumer education and public service announcements to minimize misperceptions relating to HPV testing and vaccination in order to maximize adoption of cervical cancer prevention tools.
- Subject
- human papillomavirus; vaccination and immunization; cancer prevention; cervical cancer; cancer screening; graphs; Australia; human papillomavirus infection
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1351916
- Identifier
- uon:30797
- Identifier
- ISSN:1932-6203
- Rights
- © 2017 Schmid et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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