Bachelor Thesis from the year 2023 in the subject Communications - Multimedia, Internet, New Technologies, grade: B, University of Lagos, course: Mass Communication, language: English, abstract: Health pandemics are a regular occurrence in many nations around the world that often necessitate some form of behaviour change to save the lives of citizens leaving government and health bodies like the National Centre for Disease Control to spend billions to communicate behavioural change messages that can persuade recipients to adopt new healthy behaviours. This study studied the influence of behavioural change communication methods employed by the Federal Government and other bodies during the COVID-19 pandemic on vaccine hesitancy with a focus on undergraduates of the University of Lagos.

The study employed questionnaire surveys with questions that sampled the perception of over 400 students of messages intended to persuade them to take the COVID-19 vaccine. The study discovered that respondents who got behavioural change communication messages were persuaded in favour of the vaccine.

However, the need to pay attention to the BCC message design process that included choice of medium, the role of the influencing audience as well as relatedness of the message were discovered as inhibiting factors to the effectiveness of BCC messages. .