Who Is to Blame? Framing HPV to Influence Vaccination Intentions among College Students

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a prevalent sexually transmitted infection (STI) among college students. Although previous research has studied HPV-related health communication strategies using various framing techniques, the goal of this study is to test how two unique message frames—whether mentioning HPV as an STI and whether to attribute the cause of infection as external or internal—would influence young adults’ intentions to receive the recommended HPV vaccine. Results indicate that gender and causal attribution framing influenced participants’ intentions to receive the HPV vaccine.