COVID-19 vaccination beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours among health and social care workers in the UK: Survey dataset – User Guide

Permanent identifier

10.17037/DATA.00002525

Data description

Data collected as part of an online cross-sectional survey to investigate COVID-19 vaccination beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours amongst health and social care workers (H&SCWs) in the UK by socio-demographic and employment variables. The survey included four main sections, comprised of questions relating to: (1) Demographics; (2) Employment; (3) COVID-19 vaccination beliefs and COVID-19 risk perceptions; and (4) Sources of COVID-19 vaccination information. In total, 1919 people were surveyed – 1658 healthcare workers (HCWs) and 261 social care workers (SCWs).

Data collection methods

Online cross-sectional survey; Semi-structured telephone qualitative interviews.

The study used a mixed-methods approach – involving an online cross-sectional survey and semi-structured interviews – to gain insight into COVID-19 vaccination beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours amongst health and social care workers (H&SCWs) in the UK by socio-demographic and employment variables. 1917 people were surveyed – 1658 healthcare workers (HCWs) and 261 social care workers (SCWs). Twenty participants were interviewed.  A multi-methods approach was used to quantify the prevalence of different views on COVID-19 vaccine acceptability and to explore reasons behind these views. The survey included demographic questions and closed and open-text questions.

Recruitment to the study led to 2307 survey link click-throughs. Of these, 388 cases were removed due to the participants not responding to questions beyond the 50% survey progress mark. Two further cases were removed due to ineligibility (i.e. participants were not frontline H&SCWs currently working in the UK), leaving 1917 included participants.

In order to run the logistic regressions with an appropriate number of participants in each of the subcategories of the categorical variables, the variables Ethnicity and Job role were recoded from 20 categories and 16 categories, respectively, into an Ethnicity variable with 7 categories and a Job role variable with 6 categories. In addition, we performed a factor analysis on the Vaccine belief and Trust in information source items to reduce the number of variables in the regression models. This reduced the 13 Vaccine belief items into two composite variables; Combined COVID-19 Vaccine belief (important, safe, and effective) (Cronbach’s Alpha = .918) and Social norms to vaccinate against COVID-19 (Cronbach’s Alpha = .661) and 4 single items. The 12 Trust in information source items were reduced to three composite variables Trust in health system sources (Cronbach’s Alpha = .876), Trust in non-health system sources (Cronbach’s Alpha = .738), and Trust in Friends and Family members (Cronbach’s Alpha = .876).

Participants were not required to answer every question in the survey. Missing data were assessed to be low and missing at random. Multiple imputation was used to replace missing data in continuous variables for use in each logistic regression model and comparisons.

Although participant permission was provided for interview and open-text data to be shared, there are concerns that the data content may result in participant harm. Therefore, we are sharing the quantitative survey data only.

Additional information

Anonymised data may be requested for the purpose of academic research and healthcare improvement, subject to evidence of ethics approval being provided. Processing has been performed to de-identify the dataset while maintaining the research context. To manage the risk of indirect identification through analysis of several variables (due to the low number of responses received for some questions) and use of other data sources, additional processing may be performed when preparing data to fulfil the access request. In circumstances where full de-identification is not feasible without context loss, applicants will be asked to sign a Data Transfer Agreement as a condition of data access.

Geographic regions

United Kingdom

Key dates

Survey data was collected between January 22nd and February 8th 2021.

Quality controls

Briefly describe any quality check that you performed on the data and/or within the project as a whole

Population

Human population

Keywords

COVID-19; COVID-19 vaccination; healthcare workers; social care workers; United Kingdom

Language of written material

English

Ethics

Ethical approval was granted by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Observational Research Ethics Committee (study reference: 22923).

Project

Data creators

File description