Original articlePredictors of STI vaccine acceptability among parents and their adolescent children
Section snippets
Study population and procedure
We recruited participants from waiting rooms of urban primary care adolescent health clinics and community-based pediatric private practices. Inclusion criteria included ability to understand English, adolescent’s age from 12 to 17 years, and adolescent accompanied by a parent or legal guardian. Of the parent-adolescent pairs who met the inclusion criteria, 62% agreed to participate in the study. The majority (nearly 70%) of those who declined to participate did so due to time constraints.
Descriptive statistics
Sample descriptives are presented in Table 1. The 320 parents/guardians were 24 to 66 years of age (mean = 41.0; SD = 7.1), 93.1% were female, 59.7% described themselves as white, 36.3% as African-American, and 4.0% as other race/ethnic group. The 320 adolescents were 12 to 17 years of age (mean = 14.3; SD = 1.6), 67.2% were female, 59.7% described themselves as white, 36.9% as African-American, and 3.4% as other race/ethnic group.
With respect to STI vaccine acceptability, 85.3% of parents
Discussion
This study evaluated both parents’ and their adolescents’ attitudes about STI vaccination. As expected, we found high levels of acceptability for STI vaccination, with approximately 90% endorsing vaccination against herpes and HIV. Even a vaccine for a treatable infection (gonorrhea) was deemed acceptable to over 80% of parents and adolescents. These results are consistent with previous studies, which have also shown relatively high parental acceptability of STI vaccines [13], [15], [16]. Also,
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Freddie Harris for his assistance with data entry and management and April Ravert for her assistance with data collection and planning.
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This study was funded by grant U19 AI31494 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, MD.