Background
One of the most notable aspects of today’s living in the West, is the fact that, even though the level of educational attainment among people continues to increase rather exponentially, a considerable number of citizens nevertheless cannot help remaining perceptually arrogant – especially when their attitudes to the various healthcare practices/policies are being concerned. The validity of this statement can be illustrated, in regards to the fact that, as practice indicates, a good half of practicing Christians in the U.S. opposes the policy of vaccination.
Nevertheless, there is a good reason to believe that their stance is not being of a strictly theological (rational) nature – rather it reflects these people’s deep-seated unconscious anxieties. In its turn, this presupposes the legitimacy of the psychological intervention, as the method of helping the concerned individuals to grow more positive about the policy in question.
Interest in Experiment
Many of my religious friends and relatives happened to hold highly negative attitudes towards the very idea of vaccination, as such that in their view is being inconsistent with the ‘word of God’. Nevertheless, even though I used to apply a great effort, while trying to educate them about the fact that this simply could not be the case (Bible was written before the concept of vaccination came into being), this did not seem to have any effect on them, whatsoever. In its turn, this prompted me to consider the possibility that the reason, as to why this was the case, had to do with my failure to rely on the discursively appropriate mediums of channeling information, within the context of how I went about popularizing the practice of vaccination.
Hypothesis
As it was pointed out earlier, many religious individuals do tend to rationalize their negative attitude towards vaccination. However, such their tendency can be well hypothesized as the extrapolation of these people’s unconscious fear of ‘pollution’. That is, those who oppose vaccination happened to be psychologically uncomfortable with the idea of a vaccine being injected into their bodies, which in turn causes them to believe that vaccination poses a great threat to their health.
What it means is that, while promoting the policy of vaccination among religiously minded individuals, one should be much better off deploying the emotionally-charged approach to doing it – such as exposing them to the appropriately designed poster, which would encourage these individuals to associate the practice in question with the notion of healthiness.
Social Experiment
Four selected participants (the members of the Baptist Church) will be presented with the vaccination-promoting poster and asked to reflect upon what kind of effect did it have on their perception of the concerned policy.
Predicted Outcomes
It is predicted that the participants’ exposure to the poster will cause them to experience the sensation of a cognitive dissonance (as the consequence of this poster’s motifs being utterly inconsistent with the concerned individuals’ ‘rational’ outlook on the practice of vaccination). Moreover, there should be a number of the behavioral indications (exhibited by the participants) that this indeed was the case.
Purpose
To test the validity of the hypothesis that people’s acceptance of vaccination extrapolates their largely unconscious fear of a foreign substance being injected into their bodies. The experiment will also seek to confirm/disconfirm the validity of the idea that the factor of a ‘peer pressure’ affects the participants’ perception of the practice in question.
Methodology
The experiment’s methodology is concerned with exposing the selected participants to the vaccination-promoting poster, observing their emotional reactions to what it being presented to them and interpreting what may account for the induced reactions’ discursive significance.
Measurement
The researchers will measure the intensity of the participants’ emotional responses to the applied external stimuli (poster).
Data collection
The instruments for collecting the empirical data will be pulse monitors and questionnaires, distributed among the participants, in order to allow the latter to articulate their rational reaction to the poster’s themes and motifs.
Limitation
The fact that the proposed methodology to collecting data presupposes that the would-be received interpretative insights are going to be highly subjective.
Improvement
The proposed experiment could be improved by the mean of increasing the extent of its cross-sectional integrity (the more there participants, the better).
Possible flaws
Among the possible flaws will be considered with the possibility for the would-be deployed equipment to malfunction, and the fact that the proposed research-methodology presupposes that the participants will be in the position to misrepresent what happened to be their true emotional responses to the poster.