How Fear and Collectivism Influence Public's Preventive Intention Towards COVID-19 Infection: A Study Based on Big Data from the Social Media

Abstract

Background Despite worldwide calls for precautionary measures to combat COVID-19, the public’s preventive intention still varies significantly among different regions. Exploring the influencing factors of the public’s preventive intention is very important to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Previous studies have found that fear can effectively improve the public’s preventive intention, but they ignore the impact of differences in cultural values. The present study examines the combined effect of fear and collectivism on public’s preventive intention towards COVID-19 through the analysis of social media big data. Methods The Sina microblog posts of 108,914 active users from Chinese mainland 31 provinces were downloaded. The data was retrieved from 11 January 2020 to 21 February 2020. Afterwards, we conducted a province-level analysis on the contents of downloaded posts. Three lexicons were applied to automatically recognise the scores of fear, collectivism and preventive intention of 31 provinces. Thereafter, a multiple regression model were established to examine the combined effect of fear and collectivism on public’s preventive intention towards COVID-19. The simple slope test and the Johnson-Neyman technique were used to test the interaction of fear and collectivism on preventive intention. Results The study reveals that: (a) both fear and collectivism can positively predict people’s preventive intention (fear: β = 0.324, t = 11.685, p < 0.001; collectivism: β = 0.284, t = 10.433, p < 0.001) and (b) there is an interaction of fear and collectivism on people’s preventive intention (β = −0.134, t = − 5.963, p < 0.001), where fear and collectivism reduce each other’s positive influence on people’s preventive intention. Conclusion The promotion of fear on people’s preventive intention may be limited and conditional, and values of collectivism can well compensate for the promotion of fear on preventive intention. These results provide scientific inspiration on how to effectively enhance the public’s preventive intention towards COVID-19. For example, ‘Keeping social distance can protect you and your family from infection’ may be a more effective communication strategy than ‘Keeping social distance can protect you from infection’.

Examining the intention to stay home due to COVID-19: a pandemic's second wave outlook

“…The investigation found a positive and significant influence of fear of COVID-19 on ItSAH (H1 accepted). These results are consistent with the previous studies like Huang et al (2020) and Guan et al (2020) who found the fear of COVID-19 distressed and bring anxiety among the people. Besides, these results are in line with Shah et al (2020) who found fear of COVID-19 as a significant predictor of mast purchase attitudes.…”

“…Labrague and Santos (2021) statistically found that amplified level of fear of COVID-19 is significantly related to increased organizational distress, decreased job satisfaction and both professional and organizational turnover intentions. In China, Huang et al (2020) completed a province-level investigation. The outcomes of the study revealed a positive effect of both fear and collectivism on people's preventive intention.…”

“…Inopportunely, fear may intensify the impairment of the disease itself. An occurrence of pandemic-natured COVID-19 has made worse fears globally (Huang et al , 2020; Guan et al , 2020), which ultimately leading to disgrace in some cases (Li et al ., 2020; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020a, b). According to Pappas et al (2009), fear has a direct connection with its transmission rate, morbidity and mortality.…”

Balancing the Freedom-Security Tradeoff During Crises and Disasters

“…Especially when increased security becomes socially normative, acting in line with group norms and for the safety of others may not feel like losing freedom to the same extent as it would to people in a more individualistic cultural context. Consistent with this possibility, some initial evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that higher levels of collectivism were related to greater support of restrictive policies (Pei et al, 2020), greater compliance with mask and social distancing mandates (Bazzi et al, 2021;Huang et al, 2020;Lu et al, 2021), lower rates of mental health distress (Germani et al, 2020; though see also Kowal et al, 2020), and lower rates of virus transmission and death (Pei et al, 2020).…”

General Practitioner perspectives and wellbeing during the COVID-19 Pandemic: a mixed method social media analysis

“…Unsurprisingly, this has focused recently on issues related to COVID-19 and work practices [16]. Analysis of Twitter posts is used commonly to identify public experiences and opinions, including recently on COVID-19 and its impact [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31].Medical professionals' opinions about COVID-19 have been studied using social media [32], but no studies to date have examined GP wellbeing using social media monitoring, which is the aim of this study.…”