Growing up as the daughter of refugees from Vietnam, Kim-Phuong Truong-Vu often helped her parents navigate the complexities of the U.S. health care system. These early experiences were deepened later while working at a domestic violence shelter, where she witnessed firsthand how clinical environments can misunderstand, and at times mistreat and marginalize, domestic violence survivors.
“Seeing what it’s like when someone doesn’t have health insurance or when someone who wasn’t born in the United States navigates this system—those are some of the driving inspirations for why I went into medical sociology,” said Truong-Vu, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences.
While Truong-Vu’s early life sparked her commitment to health equity, a specific academic discovery turned her focus toward vaccines. As a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU), she came across a dataset on human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates that revealed unexpectedly low uptake across all demographic groups.
This finding was jarring. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Truong-Vu had worked as a peer health educator around the time of the initial HPV vaccine rollout. She had shared information about its benefits with her peers. Years later at CU, she expected that many young people would have taken advantage of the opportunity to protect themselves against the illnesses caused by HPV.
“I was just so surprised that the numbers were so low for everybody across gender, race, ethnicity, and age,” she recalled. “I started getting curious about why it is that there’s this really great vaccine that can prevent all these illnesses, but people aren’t getting it.”
While much of the existing research about vaccine-related attitudes focuses on the views of U.S.-born white or Black Americans, Truong-Vu has shifted the lens toward the nuanced perceptions of diverse immigrant groups.
In a recent study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, she conducted in-depth interviews with Vietnamese American parents who immigrated to the United States after the war in Vietnam about their attitudes toward vaccines and the U.S. health care system. Her qualitative findings revealed that their views were shaped by two distinct experiences: the lack of preventative care access during their youth in Vietnam, and their subsequent resettlement in the United States where such care is a readily available. To these parents, vaccines were viewed as a privilege they were fortunate to be able to offer their children.
“People tend to think that everyone has a very similar view or similar experiences related to vaccines, but this study shows how it can be so different for various populations based on time, history, and encounters with inequalities,” she said. “I think that’s the beauty of sociology.”
Currently, Truong-Vu is applying this lens to the Haitian community in South Florida. Previous research at the University of Miami has found that Haitian women in South Florida have high rates of cervical cancer, a disease the HPV vaccine prevents. With funding from Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Miller School of Medicine, Truong-Vu has interviewed Haitian American parents to understand their knowledge of and unique standpoints on the HPV vaccine.
“Our next step is to collaborate with the Haitian community to increase knowledge in an informed, holistic way that actually improves vaccination outcomes,” she said.
For a separate study supported by a Provost’s Research Award, Truong-Vu is using restricted nationally representative survey data from the National Immunization Survey –Teen to quantitatively examine racial and ethnic differences in parents’ attitudes toward vaccines before, during, and after the pandemic.
To improve vaccination rates and other health outcomes, Truong-Vu explained, it’s important for researchers to study the health care-related attitudes of specific demographic groups, rather than grouping everyone together or excluding some groups completely, which often happens to immigrant populations like Vietnamese Americans and Haitian Americans.
“If we want to increase health equity for all, what I think is really important is centering and understanding that unique perspective,” she said. “When we really take the time to understand a group’s standpoint, we can improve access and health outcomes.”
Attitudes toward vaccination involve a multitude of different factors, Truong-Vu explained, which makes interdisciplinary research on this topic especially important. Since arriving at the University in 2022, Truong-Vu has collaborated with colleagues at Sylvester and the School of Law, as well as in the Department of Political Science.
“What really drew me to the University of Miami is that there’s a lot of support here, and I felt very welcomed,” she said. “I really appreciate the team science aspect of the University.”
