Discourses of Prevention: A Multimodal Study of HPV Vaccination Campaigns in Italy

This study assesses the communicative effectiveness of Italian HPV vaccination campaign materials using a mixed-methods design that combines expert annotation and a public perception experiment. A corpus of 49 official documents was annotated by six experts (three Linguistics Ph.D. students and three Gynecology residents) across 56 variables capturing the appropriateness and efficiency of verbal and visual elements. The perception experiment, administered to a convenience sample of Italian general public, examined attitudes toward HPV vaccination and evaluations of communication effectiveness. Overall, both expert and public assessments converged in judging the HPV vaccination campaign materials as relatively weak, citing reduced informativeness in overly concise texts, inappropriate choice of colors, and recurring issues regarding gender representation, inclusivity, and diversity.