Abstract
Despite the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, it provided the opportunity to investigate factors associated with compliance with public health measures that could inform responses to future pandemics. We analysed cross-country data (k = 121, N = 15,740) collected one year into the COVID-19 pandemic to investigate factors related to compliance with COVID-19 guidelines. These factors include social norms, moral values, trust, stress, and demographic factors. We found that social norms to follow preventive measures were positively correlated with compliance with local prevention guidelines. Compliance was also predicted by concern about the moral value of harm and care, trust in government and the scientific community, stress, and demographic factors. Finally, we discuss country-level differences in the associations between predictors and compliance. Overall, results indicate that the harm/care dimension of moral foundations and trust are critical to the development of programs and policies aimed at increasing compliance with measures to reduce the spread of disease.
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Data availability
The data analysis was pre-registered (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/5WA3C). The dataset is available in the Open Science Framework repository: COVIDiSTRESS II Consortium, 2021. COVIDiSTRESS II Global Survey (https://osf.io/36tsd/). Source code files are available via GitHub (https://github.com/hyemin-han/COVIDiSTRESS2_Compliance).
Notes
Note that the original scale had 8 items, but following Blackburn et al. (2022), two items, “wear a face covering in public when outdoors” and “met with people outside of your household for non-essential reasons” were excluded from our analysis.
We initially planned to use generaltestBF implemented in R package BayesFactor. However, due to the complexity of the model (five moral value and seven trust variables), running generaltestBF was computationally infeasible. Thus, we conducted frequentist MLM for all 4,096 (212) combinations and then estimated their BICs. With the calculated BICs, we estimated model BFs (vs. the baseline model) since BFs can be approximated with BICs.
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This work was supported by Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) Research Grant, TAMIU Act on Ideas, the TAMIU Advancing Research, Curriculum Initiative awarded by the US Department of Education Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program (Award # P031S190304), by the NPO "Systemic Risk Institute" (No. LX22NPO5101), funded by European Union—Next Generation EU (Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, NPO: EXCELES), and by an UKRI Grant No. EP/X02170X/1 awarded under the European Commission’s “European Research Council—STG” Scheme.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design, and data curation; AMB, HH, and SV administrated the project; Data analysis was performed by HH; The first draft of the manuscript was written by AMB, HH, AJ, SS, RG, AMA, GAT, RA, DL, SMG, and YL; TLM, SC, WT, and SV commented on the previous version of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Blackburn, A.M., Han, H., Jeftić, A. et al. Predictors of compliance with COVID-19 guidelines across countries: the role of social norms, moral values, trust, stress, and demographic factors. Curr Psychol 43, 17939–17955 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05281-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05281-x