Vaccine News Quality Questionnaire

Last Updated: June 30, 2022 (Version 1)

For details on the development of this questionnaire, please refer to the Analysis Framework: Vaccine News Quality page.

The questionnaire is made up of three sections, with a series of questions within each section that pertain to either the article or the source.

Evaluate Content:

When reading an article, keep in mind the two major aspects:

The major claims the article is making
The sources of information mentioned in the article

Answer by marking a “1” under either Y (Yes), N (No), or NA (Not applicable/Don’t Know).

Each question also has tips or “hints” to further explain the question and help responses to be more uniform across multiple people.

Tally and Assess:

Tally the answers to gain a general sense of the quality of the news. The result will fall in one of three groups:

Great: High-quality (majority “Yes” answers)
Fine: Medium-quality (mix of “Yes” and “No”)
Not so good: Low-quality (majority “No” answers)

Questions are included for both article-level and source-level assessment.

For an article-level assessment, the questionnaire should take less than 10 minutes to complete. If a quicker assessment is needed, focus first on answering the “Key Questions” at the beginning of each section. If you answer “N” to any of these questions, there are most likely problematic elements to the article.
For a source-level assessment, the questions should be combined with several article-level assessments on a periodic basis. The aim of the source-level assessment is meant to identify outlets who have been able to provide quality reporting on a regular basis.

Note: We are open to feedback on this first version of the questionnaire; in particular, on the source-level questions and the scoring balance. Please contact us at artt [dot] hackshackers [dot] com with the subject line “Vaccine News Questionnaire.”