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1. Introduction
After many years of research in the field, today’s scholars have a good understanding of the reasons parents reject vaccines and the aspects of vaccines that they fear [1,2,3]. We know that they distrust the expert systems which design and deliver vaccines [4] and that they may regard vaccines as an unwelcome and unnatural incursion into a ‘natural body’ which they view as unneeded or unbeneficial [5,6]. We also know that the vaccination behaviors of our social networks are a predictor of our own behaviors [7], so it is clear that our milieu matters to the decisions we make. What is missing is a theoretical account of how and why this is the case: how the beliefs of vaccine hesitant or rejecting parents are socially constructed, acquired and reinforced. This paper draws on Bourdieu’s notions of capital and habitus to elaborate these processes.
After introducing Bourdieu’s theory, the present paper explores vaccine questioning and rejection as social practices that hold value-identified as symbolic capital-in social networks containing parents who choose not to vaccinate, or who partially vaccinate their children. Using data from two Australian cities, we identify a parent’s choice regarding vaccination as a practice that they engage in as members of societies and communities for the purpose of inclusion or belonging. Our exploration suggests that those who design interventions-whether providers, public health officials or governments-need to understand these parents as socially situated. Parents’ connections to and investments in their peer groups may be a central reason that they value peer opinions over those of the experts with whom they disagree. We offer some suggestions as to how this might inform intervention design.
1.1. Bourdieu: Capitals Informing Our Choices and Identities
Questioning and rejection of vaccines by parents is just one of many contemporary practices illuminated by the application of the ideas of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu [8,9]. Scholars have shed light on social practices from youth alcohol use [10], to moving schools [11], to sexual health [12] to preferences for different types of comedy [13], enhancing our understanding of how and why we behave in particular ways. Bourdieu’s key concepts and arguments regarding social learning and forms of capital can be summarized as follows.
Bourdieu argues that types of consumption, dispositions and...