Cross-Country Comparison of Effects of Early Government Communication on Personal Empowerment during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Taiwan and the United States

Predicting Public Cooperation Toward Government Actions in the Early Stages of an Influenza Pandemic in the United States: The Role of Authentic Governmental Communication and Relational Quality

During a public health crisis, government sector is considered the natural leader for overall preparedness and management efforts. Integrating the literature from public relations and public health disciplines, this study proposes a theoretical model to predict individuals' perceptions, communicative action, as well as their behaviors to follow the governments' instructions in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. Linking relationship management factors and the framework of the situational theory of problem-solving, the findings of this study demonstrate that authentic communication and relational quality can help increase positive perceptual, attitudinal, and behavioral outcomes desired by governments regarding pandemic management. However, our findings suggested that unproductive uses of authentic governmental communication may create adverse effects on publics' perceptions and interpretations and thus pose potential risks, particularly when a public health issue is significantly politicized. Specifically, this study found that, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in which the Trump administration was blamed for lack of planning and halting responses in the fight against the virus, conservatives who believe that the federal government is practicing authentic communication during the pandemic would consider the issue less important and irreverent; meanwhile, they would recognize more barriers to adopt preventive actions. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Perceived COVID-19 susceptibility and preventive behaviors: moderating effects of social support in Italy and South Korea

BACKGROUND

The COVID-19 pandemic hit Italy much harder than South Korea. As a way of explaining the different impact in the two countries, this study examines the moderating role of social support on the relationship between perceived susceptibility and preventive behaviors in the two countries.

METHODS

Surveys were conducted in South Korea (n = 1396) and Italy (n = 487) of participants aged 50 to 89 years.

RESULTS

South Koreans felt higher levels of perceived social support than their Italian counterparts. As would be expected, greater perceived susceptibility was associated with increased preventive behavior. Furthermore, a significant three-way interaction effect was found for perceived susceptibility, social support, and country. For Italians, a person who feels him/herself highly susceptible will increase preventive behaviors, if there is a lot of social support. On the other hand, for South Koreans, those with a low level of susceptibility perform more preventive measures than people with a high level of susceptibility if there is a lot of social support.

CONCLUSIONS

This study provides insights into how cognitive factors, such as susceptibility and severity, as well as social and environmental factors can be taken into account, and the public be told the real risk and given behavioral guidelines when a pandemic is approaching. Given the critical role of social support as a coping mechanism in crisis situations, societies should mull over ways to increase emotional and instrumental support.

Dealing with the COVID-19 crisis: Theoretical application of social media analytics in government crisis management

Little theory-grounded research addresses how to use social media strategically in government public relations through machine learning. To fill this gap, we propose a way to optimize social media analytics to manage issues and crises by using the framework of attribution theory to analyze 360,861 tweets. In particular, we examined the attribution of crisis responsibility related to the spread of COVID-19 and its relations to the negative emotions of U.S. citizens on Twitter for six months (from January 20 to June 30, 2020). The results of this study showed that social media analytics is a valid tool to monitor how the spread of COVID-19 evolved from an issue to a crisis for the Trump administration. In addition, the federal government's lack of response and inability to handle the outbreak led to citizens' engagement and amplification of negative tweets that blamed the Trump White House. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Need for cognitive closure and trust towards government predicting pandemic behavior and mental health: comparing United States and China

Residents of the United States and China have responded very differently to the implementation of COVID-19 preventive measures. This study introduces the uncertainty reduction theory and the need for cognitive closure (NFC) framework into the context of a public health crisis and compares models across the United States and China. Specifically, we collected survey data to examine how NFC, trust in government, and attitudes toward preventive measures predicted pandemic compliance behaviors, depressive symptoms, and life satisfaction among 745 college students (399 from China and 346 from the United States). Chinese participants trusted their government more, believed COVID preventive measures to be more beneficial, and reported more pandemic compliance and fewer depressive symptoms than U.S.

PARTICIPANTS

Trust in government and attitudes towards preventive measures mediated the relationships between NFC and pandemic compliance behaviors among Chinese participants but not U.S.

PARTICIPANTS

NFC predicted better mental health outcomes among participants in China compared to U.S.

PARTICIPANTS

Trust in government mediated NFC and mental health outcomes among Chinese participants. Trust in government predicted better mental health (fewer depressive symptoms and more life satisfaction) in both the United States and China. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for promoting mental health and pandemic compliance behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed.

Evolving public behavior and attitudes towards COVID-19 and face masks in Taiwan: A social media study

Facing the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan demonstrated resilience at the initial stage of epidemic prevention, and effectively slowed down its spread. This study aims to document public epidemic awareness of COVID-19 in Taiwan through collecting social media- and Internet-based data, and provide valuable experience of Taiwan’s response to COVID-19, involving citizens, news media, and the government, to aid the public in overcoming COVID-19, or infectious diseases that may emerge in the future. The volume of Google searches related to COVID-19 and face masks was regarded as an indicator of public epidemic awareness in the study. A time-series analysis was used to explore the relationships among public epidemic awareness and other COVID-19 relevant variables, which were collected based on big data analysis. Additionally, the content analysis was adopted to analyze the transmission of different types of fear information related to COVID-19 and their effects on the public. Our results indicate that public epidemic awareness was significantly correlated with the number of confirmed cases in Taiwan and the number of news reports on COVID-19 (correlation coefficient: .33–.56). Additionally, the findings from the content analysis suggested that the fear of the loss of control best explains why panic behavior occurs among the public. When confronting the highly infectious COVID-19, public epidemic awareness is vital. While fear is an inevitable result when an emerging infectious disease occurs, the government can convert resistance into assistance by understanding why fear arises and which fear factors cause excessive public panic. Moreover, in the digitalization era, online and social media activities could reflect public epidemic awareness that can e harnessed for epidemic control.