Sociodemographic and Psychological Correlates of Compliance with the COVID-19 Public Health Measures in France

Abstract

IntroductionThe COVID-19 disease was first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, having since spread rapidly across the world. The infection and mortality rates of the disease have forced governments to implement a wave of public health measures. Depending on the context, these range from the implementation of simple hygienic rules to measures such as social distancing or lockdowns that cause major disruptions in citizens' daily lives. The success of these crucial public health measures rests on the public's willingness to comply. However, individual differences in following the official public health recommendations for stopping the spread of COVID-19 have not yet to our knowledge been assessed. This study aims to fill this gap by assessing the sociodemographic and psychological correlates of implementing public health recommendations that aim to halt the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigate these associations in the context of France, one of the countries that has been most severely affected by the pandemic, and which ended up under a nationwide lockdown on March 17. In the next sections we describe our theoretical expectations over the associations between sociodemographics, personality, ideology, and emotions with abiding by the COVID-19 public health measures. We then test these hypotheses using data from the French Election Study.

How to Improve Compliance with Protective Health Measures during the COVID-19 Outbreak: Testing a Moderated Mediation Model and Machine Learning Algorithms

“…“High” and “low” levels of both moderators were determined at one standard deviation above and below the mean of each scale. Taking into account previous findings [ 38 , 39 , 40 , 42 , 43 ], all analyses controlled for age, education, and level of personality dysfunction. Finally, ML models were trained and tested in WEKA 3.9 [ 59 ].…”

“…More recently, several studies have investigated which factors were associated with compliance with the preventive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results indicated that the demographic variables of male gender and younger age were associated with lower levels of compliance [ 38 , 39 , 40 ], while—albeit not consistently—the demographic variables of a higher level of education and being married were associated with greater compliance [ 38 ].…”

Compliance Without Fear: Individual-Level Predictors of Protective Behavior During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The elderly and individuals with particular chronic diseases are at very high risk of getting seriously ill, whereas most other groups are much less likely to get hospitalized and often suffer only mild symptoms (Jordan, Adab and Cheng 2020). Consistent with this, research from early cases of COVID-19 found that age (Rosenfeld, Rothgerber and Wilson 2020) and direct measures of fear (Brouard, Vasilopoulos and Becher 2020;Harper et al 2020;Kachanoff et al 2020) are major determinants of protective behavior compliance.…”

Face-Saving Strategies Increase Self-Reported Non-Compliance with COVID-19 Preventive Measures: Experimental Evidence from 12 Countries

“…Doing so, we examine whether results are generalizable beyond Canada. In addition, we test whether the impact of the face-saving answer option is homogenous across different subsets of the population to assess potential differentiated effects conditional on individual characteristics (Barari et al 2020;Brouard et al 2020). To preview our results, we show that the face-saving strategy is a very useful tool in every country examined, increasing respondents' proclivity to report non-compliance by 9 to 16 percentage points.…”

“…Face-saving treatment from gender, age and education, which are known to be linked to compliance with preventive measures (Barari et al 2020;Brouard et al 2020). For this analysis, we rely on a pooled dataset that includes the information from all countries.…”