The Political Psychology of Covid-19 Vaccines: Multilayered Understandings of Pfizer and Sinovac Vaccines in the Philippines

Date of Award

5-1-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Social Psychology

First Advisor

Cristina J. Montiel, PhD

Abstract

Covid-19 reveals how political debates lead to multiple understandings of vaccine brands in a population. Extant literature examines these understandings using multifactor models that determine the various understanding of vaccine brands. However, this paper argues that public understanding of a social object is not only an individualistic processing of factors embedded across socioecological contexts but a collective discursive approach where people agentically construct their understanding. Borrowing from two theoretical frameworks, we propose a multilayered understanding framework to examine the different interpretations nested on Sinovac and Pfizer Covid- 19 vaccines on Philippine Twitter. We use both mixed-method design to analyze our collected Filipino tweets (N = 229,236). Our results exhibit the importance of trust across different layers of interpretations, however, our study also highlights how trust situated in the mesolayer promotes a converging storyline for both vaccine brands as the public focuses on economic resources and survival over their personal beliefs and political affiliations.

Keywords: Covid-19, vaccine brands, multilayered understanding, discursive psychology, political psychology, trust

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