The COVID States Project #59: What Americans think about people who are not vaccinated
In this report, we evaluate how people feel about those who are vaccinated and those who are not. A common way of measuring these feelings is through feeling thermometers – special survey items aimed at capturing a respondent’s overall level of warmth towards a particular person, group, or idea. Two of the thermometer questions we asked measured feelings towards “People who are vaccinated against COVID-19” and “People who are NOT vaccinated against COVID-19”, with response options ranging from 0 to 100 degrees. These are the two key outcome variables for this report (see the appendix for full question wording). To evaluate the gap between feelings towards those who are vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who are not, we take the difference in scores between the two corresponding thermometer questions. That tells us how much more favorably respondents view one group compared to the other. Our analyses examine how feelings expressed by the respondents are linked to factors such as partisanship, education, gender, age, income, place of residence and personal vaccination status, among others.