Preliminary findings on the validation of the 7C scale of vaccination readiness in Serbia

Abstract

The 7C scale of vaccination readiness (Geiger et al., 2021) is a newly introduced instrument that distinguishes between seven components determining the likelihood that an individual will be willing to get vaccinated: Confidence (trust in vaccines and health authorities), Complacency (low perceived disease risk), Constraints (structural and psychological barriers), Calculation (weighting personal costs and benefits), Collective Responsibility (desire to protect others), Compliance (support for societal monitoring and punishment of the unvaccinated), and Conspiracy (belief in misinformation). We wanted to test the reliability of the forward-backward translated 7C scale in Serbia and how it relates to existing measures (construct validity) and reported vaccination behaviors (concurrent validity). Data were collected in an online survey distributed on social media in December 2021. We administered the 7C scale with three items per component (rating scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). In the sample of N = 404 participants residing in Serbia (aged 18–77 years, M = 48.4, SD = 12.9), 56.44% reported being female; 2.48% had elementary or no education, 44.06% a high school education, and 53.46% higher education. Internal consistency was high for the full scale (Cronbach’s alpha = .95) and satisfactory for all components (.79–.94), except Calculation (.63). Confidence was related to trust in health care providers (r = .53), health care institutions (r = .50), and science (r = .56, all ps < .001). Complacency was related to subjective danger invulnerability (r = -.35, p < .001). Compliance was related to support for COVID-19 vaccine certificates (r = .91) and mandatory COVID-19 vaccination for adults (r = .89, all ps < .001) in Serbia. Conspiracy was related to conspiracy mentality (r = .66) and general vaccine (r = .90) and COVID-19 pandemic conspiracy beliefs (r = .79, all ps < .001). The total score was related to past vaccine hesitancy (r = -.54) and future intention to get vaccinated (r = 0.86, all ps < .001). It predicted higher odds of having received at least one dose (OR = 6.61, 95% CI [4.65, 9.41], n = 383, 54.05% vaccinated) as well as the third dose (OR = 2.79, 95% CI [1.96, 3.98], n = 205, 71.22% vaccinated) of the COVID-19 vaccine. The 7C scale in Serbian and its components correlated with validation constructs in the expected directions and showed promise in predicting real-world vaccination outcomes.