A Comment on "The Association between Vaccination Status Identification and Societal Polarization", Henkel et al. (2023)

Henkel et al. (2023) investigate the relationship between identification with one's vaccination status against COVID-19 and various measures of societal polarization. They find that vaccination status identification (VSI) moderates the relationship between vaccination status and (1) perception of public discourse, (2) perception of being discriminated against, (3) perceived ostracism, (4) ingroup preference in Dictator Game donations, (5) reactance to a vaccination mandate, and (6) self-reported engagement in activism against the mandate. First, we reproduce the paper's main findings in both R (using the original code as well as new code) and Stata, without any errors that affect the study's main results. Second, we conduct sensitivity analyses where we (1) account for the fact that some respondents change vaccination status (using panel regressions with fixed effects) and (2) conduct logistic regressions (instead of linear regressions) on the two binary outcome variables. Results are mostly in line with the original findings, except in the fixed effects models where the interaction between vaccination status and VSI was not significant for some of the outcome variables. However, this could also result from a lower number of observations in these regressions.