Retaining blood donors is a cost-effective way of ensuring a safe blood supply, yet despite the plethora of research, only 5.1% of the eligible population in Australia donate blood and 40% of these do not make a second donation. We offer an alternative to traditional approaches by conceptualizing blood donation within social representations theory as socially derived symbolic knowledge with a specific focus on cognitive polyphasia and Guimelli's (1998) normative and functional dimensions. An online survey, completed by 703 residents from NSW Australia, comprised a blood donation word association task, Likert-style questions constructed from previous word association data and contextualized blood donation statements. Individual difference scaling analysis revealed all donor groups (including non-donors) associated blood donation with a few central, albeit contradictory ideas/beliefs. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis performed on a split data set of the Likert-style items reiterated this finding. Interpreted through Guimelli's dichotomy, all donor groups were aware of these contradictory normative and functional ideas/beliefs but when explicitly asked, it was the functional aspect that differentiated the groups. We argue the key to retaining donors is understanding the interdependence between how blood donation is socially understood at the societal level of discourse and donor behaviour. Translational strategies for recruitment and retention are discussed.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 12 June 2017.
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#9,062,266
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Outputs from British Journal of Social Psychology
#730
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#156,386
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Outputs of similar age from British Journal of Social Psychology
#13
of 17 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 27,448,172 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 66th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,127 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 22.2. This one is in the 34th percentile – i.e., 34% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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