Two-Year Survey Tracks Shifting HPV Vaccine Attitudes Among Kenyan Parents

A longitudinal survey of Kenyan parents and caregivers shows that attitudes toward the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine shifted substantially between 2022 and 2024, with safety perceptions proving far less stable than beliefs about the vaccine’s importance or effectiveness.

Researchers conducted a random digit-dialed phone survey in 2022 of 1,405 Kenyan parents and caregivers of girls age-eligible for the HPV vaccine. When the team re-contacted respondents in 2024, 1,093 people, or 78 percent, were successfully re-surveyed.

Both surveys used identical questions about HPV vaccine and vaccination attitudes, adapted from the Vaccine Hesitancy Scale-HPV. This design allowed the researchers to estimate the direction and degree of each person’s attitude change over the two-year period, both overall and for individual questions and constructs.

The results revealed a striking divergence across attitude domains. Perceptions of the vaccine’s importance and effectiveness were relatively stable, with only 25 percent of respondents reporting any change in these views between the two survey waves.

Safety perceptions, by contrast, changed dramatically. Two-thirds of respondents altered their beliefs about the vaccine’s side effects and riskiness over the two years. Approximately one-quarter of respondents developed worse safety attitudes, while 18.9 percent improved their safety attitude, indicating that movement occurred in both directions.

The analysis also identified demographic patterns in who changed. Attitude changes were significantly more common among respondents with lower educational attainment and those who were unemployed, suggesting that socioeconomic position shaped how views evolved during the study period.

Among individuals with lower socioeconomic status, attitudes about following a clinician’s HPV vaccination recommendation and about the riskiness of the HPV vaccine significantly worsened between 2022 and 2024, according to the study findings.

The authors conclude that, in this population of Kenyan adults over a two-year period, attitudes about the HPV vaccine changed both positively and negatively. They suggest that targeted interventions may be needed, particularly with less socioeconomically advantaged groups, to reinforce messages about the vaccine’s importance, effectiveness, and safety.

The researchers also emphasize that further research is needed into the reasons for the large changes in safety perceptions, which moved toward both more and less favorable views. Because few studies have examined within-person shifts in vaccine attitudes over time, the longitudinal design offers a rare window into how individual beliefs about HPV vaccination evolve rather than how population averages differ across separate samples.

Subject of Research: HPV vaccine attitudes in Kenya

Article Title: Changes in attitudes toward the HPV vaccine in Kenya

Article References: Moucheraud, C., Miao, J., Ochieng, E., Zhang, S., Ganda, G., Golub, G., Hoffman, R. M., Szilagyi, P. G., & Suen, S.-C. (2026). Changes in attitudes toward the HPV vaccine in Kenya. PLOS Global Public Health, 6(10), e0007508. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0007508

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0007508

Keywords: HPV vaccine, vaccine hesitancy, Kenya, longitudinal survey, vaccination attitudes, public health, Changes, attitudes, toward, vaccine, scientific research