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Understanding vaccination decision-making processes is vital for guiding vaccine promotion within pandemic contexts and for routine immunization efforts. Vaccine-related attitudes influencing individual decision-making can be affected by broader cultural and normative contexts. We conducted 73 qualitative interviews with adults in China ( n = 40) and Germany ( n = 33) between December 2020 and April 2021 to understand COVID-19 vaccination intentions and preferences, and we analyzed transcripts using a five-step framework approach. During early analysis, we identified moral considerations in line with the tenets of the Model of Moral Motives (MMM) as a recurrent theme in the data. The MMM guided further analysis steps, particularly with its distinction between motives that are proscriptive (focus on avoiding harm by inhibiting "bad" behavior) and prescriptive (focus on actively seeking positive outcomes). Proscriptive vaccination arguments that compelled vaccination in our data included avoiding negative attention, being a law-abiding citizen, preventing harm to others, and protecting one's country. Prescriptive motives focused on self-efficacious behavior such as protecting the health of oneself and others via widespread but voluntary vaccination, prioritizing elderly and predisposed individuals for vaccination, and favoring a fair and equitable distribution of vaccines at the global level. In the interviews in China, both lines of arguments emerged, with a general tendency toward more proscriptive reasoning; interviews conducted in Germany tended to reflect more prescriptive motives. We encourage research and vaccine promotion practice to reflect moral considerations when aiming to understand public health preventive behavior and when developing tailored health promotion campaigns., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The impact of ChatGPT and other large language model-based applications on scientific work is being debated across contexts and disciplines. However, despite ChatGPT's inherent focus on language generation and processing, insights regarding its potential for supporting qualitative research and analysis remain limited. In this article, we advocate for an open discourse on chances and pitfalls of AI-supported qualitative analysis by exploring ChatGPT's performance when analyzing an interview transcript based on various prompts and comparing results to those derived by an experienced human researcher. Themes identified by the human researcher and ChatGPT across analytic prompts overlapped to a considerable degree, with ChatGPT leaning toward descriptive themes but also identifying more nuanced dynamics (e.g., 'trust and responsibility' and 'acceptance and resistance'). ChatGPT was able to propose a codebook and key quotes from the transcript which had considerable face validity but would require careful review. When prompted to embed findings into broader theoretical discourses, ChatGPT could convincingly argue how identified themes linked to the provided theories, even in cases of (seemingly) unfitting models. In general, despite challenges, ChatGPT performed better than we had expected, especially on identifying themes which generally overlapped with those of an experienced researcher, and when embedding these themes into specific theoretical debates. Based on our results, we discuss several ideas on how ChatGPT could contribute to but also challenge established best-practice approaches for rigorous and nuanced qualitative research and teaching., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

HIV self-testing (HIVST) increases HIV testing in diverse populations, but little is known about the experiences of individuals who self-test. We used a five-step framework approach to analyze 62 qualitative interviews with 33 female sex workers (FSWs) participating in an HIVST trial in urban Uganda. Notions of empowerment emerged from the data, and findings were interpreted based on Kabeer's empowerment framework of resources, agency, and achievements. We found that access to HIVST bolstered empowerment because it increased participant's time and money (resources), control of testing circumstances and status disclosure (agency), and sense of competency (achievements). In addition, we found that knowledge of HIV status empowered participants to better control HIV-related behaviors (agency) and recognize a new sense of self (achievements). This suggests that the availability of HIVST can facilitate feelings of empowerment, meriting a higher awareness for benefits outside of linkage to HIV treatment and prevention services.