Dissecting the Anti-Vaccination Movement: Moving Beyond a Typical Dichotomy in Order to Understand Lifestyle Choice Non-Compliance

Understanding who participates in the anti-vaccination movement has been of public and academic interest, particularly in the last twenty years. When studying this movement, the quantitative default approach is to dichotomize vaccination groups between those who are fully-up-to-date and those who are not. Due to a lack of consistent categorization, inconsistencies arise in demographic characteristics. Using direct measures from the National Immunization Survey (NIS), I find that dichotomizing vaccination groups between fully-up-to-date and some form of underimmunized is unable to capture shifts in the movement. However, when looking at the anti-vaccination movement in terms of complete non-, selective (MMR and Varicella), and fully-up-to-date, we capture the shift in types of non-compliance associated with non-vaccinators and limit demographic inconsistencies. More specifically, the anti-vaccination movement has shifted from inequality- to lifestyle-based non-compliance.