What is it all about?
Students rank/order factors that most influence decision making related to their personal health using the customized Student Resource: Factors in Decision Making for my Personal Health Cards (e.g., family, peers, personal values, beliefs, not having sufficient information, concerns about long-term side effects). Students reflect on how the factors and/or the order of factors that influence decisions might change related to decisions about vaccinations and their personal health.
What is needed?
- Student Resource: Factors in Decision Making for My Personal Health Cards (PDF)
- Blank Factors in Decision Making Card (PDF)
- Student Resource: Factors in Decision Making about Vaccination Cards (PDF)
- Blank Factors in Decision Making About Vaccination Card (PDF)
How is it done?
Use the following instructions to facilitate the Factors in Decision Making about Vaccination activity.
Context: Adolescence is a stage of development often accompanied by a drive to exercise more independence and autonomy. Guidance from trusted and caring adults is important to support effective decision making. Providing opportunities for students to identify and reflect on factors that impact their decision-making processes can help reduce anxiety they might experience about decisions related to their personal health and lead to more effective and informed decision making to care for their mental and physical health and well-being, personal safety, and the safety of others.
- Provide groups with a set of Student Resource: Factors in Decision Making about Vaccination Cards or display the factors for students to reference. Provide a few blank cards for groups to generate and record additional factors that might influence an individual’s decisions about vaccinations and their personal health.
- Have groups discuss how each factor might influence decision making related to an individual’s personal health and vaccinations. Groups then decide which factors have the most influence on an individual’s decision about vaccinations (e.g., why someone would choose to get vaccinated OR what factors would prevent someone from getting vaccinated) and rank each factor in order of influence.
- Have groups display their ordered factors in a shared place in the classroom for other groups to reference.
- Use the group display of factors to facilitate a large group discussion about how different groups ordered the factors and why (e.g., which factors were the most influential and least influential on decisions and why, which factors might be barriers). Have students then generate solutions for factors that might be barriers to informed decision making about vaccinations (e.g., Cost: find out which vaccinations are publicly funded; Availability: find out where the vaccination locations are in their community, such as local public health units, local pharmacies; Peers: health is an individual decision and should be treated as such; Effects on Health: vaccinations are one choice to care for one’s health).
- Consolidate student understanding of the factors that affect decisions about vaccinations by having groups reflect on how they ordered the factors and how they might reorder them based on what they have learned through the group discussion.
- Consider posting the factors in the learning space for reference and use with other Healthy Living concepts and discussions related to decision making to care for one’s mental and physical health.