Youth perspective on vaccine hesitancy in Malaysia: A qualitative inquiry

accine hesitancy is one of the leading reasons for non-vaccination. World Health Organization has defined vaccine hesitancy as a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite the availability of vaccination services. Thus, any lack of convenience, confidence, and complacency may lead to vaccine hesitancy. The trend of vaccination hesitancy and refusal is snowballing due to the spreading of false information on the internet and social media. In this study, we focus on an exploratory qualitative study that investigates the youth perspective in Malaysia. The recruitment of the participants was based on a convenience sampling method. The in-depth interviews among youth from Universiti Malaysia Pahang aged between 18-27 years were conducted with adoptedthematic analysis. Codes and themes were generated with investigator triangulation. The emerging themes weresummarized into a conceptual model. In this study, 33 participants were interviewed. The majority of the participants werebelow 20 years of age (54.5%), and most of them were female participants (63.6%) of Malay ethnicity (72.7%). 93.9% of them were studying at the bachelor’s degree level and they were all living with other students. Most of the participants (78.8%) used smartphone/tablet as the main platform for exchanging information and 69.7% of them spent about 4 to 6 hours on social media per day. A total of 5 themes and 12 sub-themes were extracted from 101 codes and 12 subcategories. Three themes stipulated by participants were 1) knowledge on infectious diseases, 2) knowledge on the vaccine, 3) information evaluation contributed to confidence issues in vaccine hesitancy. Whereas the other two themes were 4) perception of the vaccine and 5) perception on hesitancy issue contributed to factors influencing complacency in vaccine hesitancy. None of the participants mentioned factors contributing to convenience issues. In conclusion, these five themes contributed to three main components of vaccine hesitancy in Malaysia.