YouTube as a Source of Information on Immunization: A Content Analysis
- Jennifer Keelan, PhD
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Department of Public Health Sciences
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
- Vera Pavri-Garcia, PhD
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Division of Natural Science
York University
Toronto, Ontario
- George Tomlinson, PhD
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Department of Public Health Sciences
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
- Kumanan Wilson, MSc, MD
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kumanan.wilson@uhn.on.ca
Department of Medicine
University of Toronto
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
To the Editor: Health care professionals have expressed concerns about the quality and veracity of information individuals receive from Internet-based sources.1 One area of controversy is the use of Internet sites to communicate information on immunization.2 YouTube is a video-sharing Internet Web site created in 2005 that provides free video streaming. It allows users to share multimedia clips that contain information related to the risks and benefits of immunization. To our knowledge, no studies have examined the content of these videos. We conducted a descriptive study to characterize the available information about immunization on YouTube.
Methods
On February 20, 2007, we searched YouTube (www.youtube.com) using the keywords vaccination and immunization. We included all unique videos with English-language content that contained any message about human immunization. We extracted information on the type of video, clip length, and scientific claims made by the video. We measured the users' interaction with …
