Parental Attitudes About Child Vaccines – Evidence of scale improvement

This study set out to develop and validate an enhanced Czech version of the Parent Attitudes about Childhood Vaccines (PACV) questionnaire, known as PACV5. The PACV5, featuring a simplified, five-point response scale, demonstrates a marked improvement in reliability over the original PACV without significantly affecting completion time. A total of 204 participants were involved in the survey, answering either the PACV or PACV5 and their responses were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis. The results indicated a superior fit of a two-factor model over a single-factor model for the PACV5 data, with the originally proposed three-factor model failing to improve model fit significantly. Feedback from participants suggests further refinement of PACV5, such as clarifying the questionnaireʼs focus on mandatory vaccinations and including items about the experience of vaccination side effects. Despite the limitation of a small sample size, the findings from this brief study highlight PACV5 as a more reliable tool than PACV in measuring vaccine hesitancy within the Czech population. As such, the PACV5 may have valuable applications in public health initiatives addressing vaccine hesitancy. Future research with larger sample sizes and translations to other languages is encouraged to corroborate these findings, demonstrate their generalizability, and further explore the overarching construct of (parental) vaccine hesitancy.