Country of origin effects in explaining motivations for COVID-19 vaccine acceptance: A cognitive-affective-norm approach

This study aims to broaden the understanding of the motivational factors influencing vaccine acceptance framed as product country image (PCI) by exploring the role of overall country image (OCI), vaccine knowledge and information inconsistency, in addition to the three most commonly investigated constructs: vaccine efficacy, fear of vaccine and social norm. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed online to 593 Vietnamese participants to collect data on COVID-19 vaccines from four different countries: the USA, the UK, Russia and China. Structural equation modelling was employed to test the proposed model and hypotheses. The results indicated that OCI had a positive effect on vaccine acceptance for vaccines from the USA and Russia, but a non-significant effect for vaccines from the UK and a negative effect for vaccines from China. Vaccine efficacy, social norm and subjective knowledge had a positive effect for most vaccines, while fear of the vaccine and information inconsistency had negative effects for certain vaccines. The results suggest that vaccine efficacy and social norm are more stable and significant predictors of vaccine acceptance than other constructs. Moreover, OCI moderated the effects of vaccine efficacy, fear of the vaccine, information inconsistency, subjective knowledge and social norm on vaccine acceptance for certain vaccines.