Determination of Perception and Attitude toward COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance: A Cross-sectional Study from Türkiye

Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread rapidly and turned into a worldwide pandemic and posed a serious threat to public health. The criterion of success of a pandemic is to vaccinate the population at a very high rate and on time.

Aim: This study was carried out to determine COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and the effect of the perception of COVID-19 on attitude toward vaccination in Türkiye.

Methods: Descriptive and cross-sectional designs were used in the study. The sample consisted of 1651 individuals. The sociodemographic form, The Scale of Attitudes toward the COVID-19 Vaccine, and Perception of COVID-19 Scale were used as the data collection form. The number and percentage distributions, means, standard deviation, Kruskal–Wallis, and Mann–Whitney U-tests were used to analyze the data.

Results: In the study, 62% of participants wanted to be vaccinated for COVID-19. It has been found that there was a significant relationship between COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and by age, gender, education level, profession, and place of residence. There was a positive correlation between the mean scores of the participants of the Perception of COVID-19 and Attitudes toward the COVID-19 Vaccination. In line with this result, increased disease perception about COVID-19 in the individuals increased their positive attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination.

Conclusion: More than half of our participants considered being vaccinated for COVID-19, but the rate of those who were neutral was substantially high. It is suggested that the training programs for vulnerable groups can be planned by determining which segment of the society perceives the disease better and the rate of vaccine refusal.