Hello!
My name is Richard and I’m a UK based social scientist. My work mostly focuses on vaccination and climate change. I study how society engages with science and how people form their beliefs.
A bit about my academic work
My PhD was on trust, risk perception and how people use different forms of information to inform their vaccine decision-making. My PhD work focused on the vaccinations that are recommended during pregnancy. Some of my recent work looked at how lockdowns due to Covid-19 have affected of the routine vaccine in the UK and, yes, some of my work has looked at how people feel about the Covid-19 vaccine. Most of my time at the moment involves me looking at the data on climate change beliefs. This blog allows me to write about the bits and pieces that interest me but don’t fit into any of the formal papers that I write.
Here some of the latest academic papers I’ve worked on:
- Paterson, P., Clarke, R. M. (2021). What vaccine hesitancy can teach us about climate change risk communication. Lancet Planetary Health
- Bell, S., Clarke, R. M., Ismail, S. A., Ojo-Aromokudu, O., Naqvi, H., Coghill, Y., Donovan, H., Letley, L., Paterson, P., Mounier-Jack, S. (under review). COVID-19 vaccination beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours among health and social care workers in the UK: a mixed-methods study. PloS One
- Bell, S., Clarke, R. M., Mounier-Jack, S., & Paterson, P. (2020). Parents’ and guardians’ views and experiences of accessing routine childhood vaccinations during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic: A mixed-methods study in England. PloS One
- Bell, S., Clarke, R. M., Mounier-Jack, S., Walker, J. L., & Paterson, P. (2020). Parents’ and guardians’ views on the acceptability of a future Covid-19 vaccine: a multi-methods study in England. Vaccine
- Clarke, R. M., Paterson, P., & Sirota, M. (2019). Do previously held attitudes dictate the extent and influence of vaccine information seeking behaviour during pregnancy? Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics.
- Clarke, R. M., Paterson, P., & Sirota, M. (2019). Determinants of satisfaction with information and additional information-seeking behaviour for the pertussis vaccination given during pregnancy. Vaccine, 37(20), 2712-2720.
- Larson, H. J.,* Clarke, R. M.*, Jarrett, C., Eckersberger, E., Levine, Z., Schulz, W. S., & Paterson, P. (2018). Measuring trust in vaccination: A systematic review. Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics, 1-11.
Why non-zero-sum?
In a zero-sum game there is a winner and there is a loser. For the winner to win the loser has to lose. Non-zero-sum is the name given for those special games that we play in life where our fates are linked. The only way for one of us to win, is for us all of us to win, and it only takes is a few bad actors for us all to lose. Both addressing climate change and mass-vaccination are society wide endeavors. Literally everyone within our society plays a role in keeping the public healthy and our planet safe to live it. They are collective project whereby, if we work together, we can achieve amazing results, and if we don’t the most vulnerable in our society feel the brunt, and we will all be worse off because of it. Non-zero-sum thinking is the only way our species is getting out of this century alive. It also has a nice dum-de-dum sound to it. I mostly picked it for a name because of that.
When and what is the next post going to be on?
If I’ve not updated this blog for a while I am either working on a massive post or someone in their infinite wisdom has decided to pay me to be an academic again. As for what I’ll write about next, here is a cryptic clue of the type of topics my mind is on at the moment:
How to contact
If you have a WordPress account feel free to leave a comment, alternately twitter is likely your best option: @RichClarkePsy
The Non-Zero-Sum Blog 