Parental Decision Making in the Context of New Medical Technologies: The HPV Vaccine and its Potential Challenges

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This project, funded by Science and Society, considers how individuals in the United States experience and interpret risk in the context of a new medical technology. The Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is the first vaccine that prevents a solely sexually-transmitted virus, considered a known cause of cervical cancer. The research will explore how and if the vaccine and its related interventions alter perceptions of risk among American women for themselves and their daughters. The HPV vaccine marks a critical shift in the health of women.Unlike most cervical cancer preventive methods of gynecological care, the vaccine targets a much younger population. The proposed research seeks to engage with questions that health intervention methods often assume, yet do not make explicit. The vaccine may soon join the ranks of required school-entry vaccines, in many ways unremarkable in its role as part of the mandated childhood vaccine series. The tension between the vaccine as novel and radical preventive possibility and its potential role as ''just another vaccine'' may evoke uncertainty for parents, policymakers, and healthcare providers.Through ethnographic methods, this project will challenge public health concepts of risk. Engaging with many of the long-standing behavioral theories, this project asks what sexual and reproductive health ''risk'' might mean for women, what counts as a health behavior, and how people define risk in their everyday lives. Over a one-year period in Los Angeles, CA, the PI will conduct archival research, ethnographic interviews, and participant observations in order to trace the effects of new technology as it moves through specific spheres of American life.