How Risk Communication via Facebook and Twitter Shapes Behavioral Intentions: The Case of Fine Dust Pollution in South Korea

Risk perception and interpersonal discussion on risk: A systematic literature review

Risk perception research has long been attentive to the fact that risk is a social construction. Nevertheless, this fact has not been integrated into empirical research in any systematic manner. Empirical studies that do focus on the social construction of risk often do so from very different positions and with different objectives in mind. Interpersonal discussion, while considered an important medium of social construction, is rarely given consideration. This systematic literature review aims to provide a coherent foundation for empirical studies of interpersonal discussion on risk. Specifically, it summarizes existing research into the reciprocal relationship between interpersonal discussion on risk and individual-level risk perception. The systematic literature review adheres to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews (PRISMA) guidelines. A total of 843 unique articles were identified, of which 60 are included in the review. A majority of the articles in the corpus found a positive association between interpersonal discussion on risk and risk perception. This association, however, lacks robustness, especially in terms of the direction of causality. Three theoretical interpretations of the relationship are found in the corpus: (1) interpersonal discussion as a conduit for risk information, (2) risk perception as shared social schemata, and (3) interpersonal discussion on risk as a facilitator of similarity between network members. Implications for future research are discussed. This literature review concludes with six guiding principles for future research into the interpersonal discussion-risk perception relationship.

Preventing the COVID-19 Outbreak in Vietnam: Social Media Campaign Exposure and the Role of Interpersonal Communication

The present study focused on the success story of Vietnam's ability to control the COVID-19 outbreak in the early stages to examine the associations between exposure to the Vietnam Ministry of Health's COVID-19 prevention social media campaign messages, interpersonal communication, attitudes, perceived norms, self-efficacy, and intentions to stay at home. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with residents in Ho Chi Minh City (N = 360). Results from mediation analyses indicated that interpersonal communication mediated the effect of social media campaign exposure on intentions to stay at home. Moreover, interpersonal communication shaped injunctive norms and self-efficacy that were conducive to behavioral intentions. These results underscored the need to leverage the power of social media and interpersonal communication in public health campaigns to prevent infectious outbreaks.

Residents' WeChat Group Use and Pro-Community Behavior in the COVID-19 Crisis: A Distal Mediating Role of Community Trust and Community Attachment

Background

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the resident's WeChat group has created a new material foundation for dialogue to occur and become a powerful platform for resident communication. This study explores the mechanism behind and the effects of residents' WeChat group use on residents' community trust, community attachment, and pro-community behavior.

Methods

An online survey questionnaire was used for data collection. The authors collected data from 500 commercial housing community residents in Wuhan, China, and analyzed the data using SPSS 26.0 and Mplus 8.3 software.

Results

This study's findings uncover that (1) residents' usage of WeChat groups has a statistically significant and positive impact on their community trust, community attachment, and pro-community behavior; (2) community trust and community attachment both play a mediating role in the mechanism behind residents' usage of WeChat groups in improving pro-community behavior; and (3) the transmission and united effects between community trust and community attachment form a distal mediating role.

Conclusion

The model systematically and comprehensively reveals the internal mechanism behind residents' adoption of pro-community behavior. Community managers can actively participate in the resident's WeChat group to ensure the dissemination of positive information in the community; enhance residents' awareness of risk, community trust, and belonging; and cultivate community resilience. At the same time, community managers should also fully recognize the important transformative roles that community trust and community belonging play between the use of WeChat groups by residents and the formation of pro-community behavior. Community managers should actively establish a warm and trusting community culture, strive to create a community atmosphere with a sense of belonging, make residents develop emotional attachment to the community, and then form behavior that is beneficial to the community, greatly enhancing the resilience and self-management of the community in disaster situations.

Measuring the Evolution of Risk Communication Strategy for Health Authorities During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Empirical Comparison Between China and the United States

Objectives: Investigate how the speech context of news conferences reveals the risk communication strategies for health authorities during COVID-19 and measure the evolution of those risk communication strategies.

Methods: We collected news conference transcripts concerning COVID-19 for the first quarter from the official websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China (NHC) in 2020. Quantitative analyses were conducted on the topics and emotions of transcripts to measure the evolution of risk communication strategy. A total of three types of analysis were carried out in our study: topic, sentiment, and risk communication evolution analyses.

Results: The trending topics and the number of these in the two institutions evolved with the infection status. The CDC and NHC maintained primarily neutral sentiment, while the non-neutral sentiment of the CDC swung more dramatically. Furthermore, the changing pattern of risk communication evolution for the CDC and NHC varied, where the latter had a more stable change routine.

Conclusion: Our study finds that the strategies could be measured by topic variation, emotional expressions, and confirmed cases. The CDC and NHC tend to adopt different risk communication strategies and have specific change routines facing the pandemic. In addition, our findings contribute to addressing the WHO research agenda for managing risk communication during the COVID-19 pandemic, which helps health authorities formulate and measure risk communication strategies.

Can High Exposure Help to Close Gaps? The Influence of COVID-19 Preventive Messages on Behavioral Intentions by Educational Attainment in Chile

The literature in the field of health communication has shown the existence of gaps between groups of different socioeconomic levels both in exposure to health campaign messages and in the influence these messages exert on individuals' health decisions. In this article, we examine the association between educational attainment and exposure to messages promoting COVID-19 preventive behaviors, namely, physical distancing, handwashing, and masks wearing in Chile. In addition, we model the association between exposure to these messages and the intentions to carry out the behaviors, as well as the differences attributable to educational attainment in the influence of exposure. A cross-sectional population survey combining online and telephone techniques was conducted among 3,592 adults in Chile. Regression analysis revealed that lower educational level and frequency of television use were positively associated with greater exposure to preventive messages. Exposure to preventive messages, in turn, was positively associated with intentions to maintain the three behaviors examined. Individuals in the lower educational attainment group had lower intentions to engage in two of the three behaviors, but those in these segments who were more exposed to preventive messages were as likely as their more educated counterparts to intend wearing masks and adhering to physical distance. The findings of this study underscore the importance of reaching the least educated segments with campaign messages in the context of public health crisis, since these messages can close gaps between the more and less educated group in their intentions to engage in preventive behaviors.

Social media mining under the COVID-19 context: Progress, challenges, and opportunities

Social media platforms allow users worldwide to create and share information, forging vast sensing networks that allow information on certain topics to be collected, stored, mined, and analyzed in a rapid manner. During the COVID-19 pandemic, extensive social media mining efforts have been undertaken to tackle COVID-19 challenges from various perspectives. This review summarizes the progress of social media data mining studies in the COVID-19 contexts and categorizes them into six major domains, including early warning and detection, human mobility monitoring, communication and information conveying, public attitudes and emotions, infodemic and misinformation, and hatred and violence. We further document essential features of publicly available COVID-19 related social media data archives that will benefit research communities in conducting replicable and reproducible studies. In addition, we discuss seven challenges in social media analytics associated with their potential impacts on derived COVID-19 findings, followed by our visions for the possible paths forward in regard to social media-based COVID-19 investigations. This review serves as a valuable reference that recaps social media mining efforts in COVID-19 related studies and provides future directions along which the information harnessed from social media can be used to address public health emergencies.

The Effects of Receiving and Expressing Health Information on Social Media during the COVID-19 Infodemic: An Online Survey among Malaysians

Social media is used by the masses not only to seek health information but also to express feelings on an array of issues, including those related to health. However, there has been little investigation on the influence of expressing and receiving information in terms of health-related engagement on social media. Moreover, little is known of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the expression and reception of health information on information overload (IO) during an infectious disease outbreak. Guided by the Cognitive Mediation Model (CMM), this study proposes a conceptual model to understand the effects of receiving and expressing COVID-19 information on social media on IO. Using an online survey conducted in Malaysia, our results indicated that risk perception positively predicted the reception and expression of information which, in turn, was positively associated with perceived stress and IO. Additionally, perceived stress triggered IO, indicating that the greater the perceived stress from health information engagement, the higher the likelihood of one experiencing IO during the pandemic. We conclude that the CMM can be extended to study IO as an outcome variable. More studies in diverse health contexts need to be conducted to enhance the conceptualization and operationalization of IO in health information processing.

Cognitive and Affective Routes to the Adoption of Protective Behaviors Against Health Risks of PM2.5 in China

The current research examines how risk appraisals of PM2.5 influence Chinese people's behavioral intentions to adopt government-recommended protective behaviors through negative affect. In testing the appraisal-based protective behavior model, this research also takes institutional trust and media sensationalism into account. An online survey is conducted with participants (N = 1,569) randomly drawn from heavily polluted Chinese regions. As predicted, negative affect mediates the effects of perceived susceptibility and perceived severity on individuals' intentions to take preventive measures against the PM2.5 risk. Institutional trust appears to increase people's behavioral intentions. However, media sensationalism decreases people's behavioral intentions.

Configurational Approach to Understand Preventive Behavior Adoption among a Non-Adhering Population During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study examined the risk preventive responses of individuals, especially those who do not adhere to preventive measures (e.g. anti-maskers) for COVID-19, by integrating three dominant theories in risk and health communication. The complex causal relationship between motivational elements and individuals' preventive behavior adoption was studied using Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. With a survey (N = 372) of non-abiding populations, this study found generalizable and unique configurations of motivational elements. Different effects of key motivational variables from three theories were found with different demographic factors. Theoretical and practical implications were also discussed.

Does social media provide adequate health education for prevention of COVID-19? A case study of YouTube videos on social distancing and hand-washing

Social media offers an opportune platform for educating the public about the recommended interventions during global health emergencies. This case study evaluated information in the popular social media platform YouTube about two key interventions (namely, 'social distancing' and 'hand washing') recommended during coronavirus disease-2019. Using the keywords 'social distancing' and 'hand washing', 77 and 78 videos, respectively, were selected from YouTube through pre-defined criteria. The understandability, actionability and quality of information in these videos were assessed. Cumulatively, the social distancing videos received >9 million views and the hand-washing videos received >37 million views. Thirteen social distancing videos (16.9%) and 46 hand-washing videos (58.9%) provided understandable, actionable and good-quality information. The non-understandable, non-actionable or poor-quality videos had paradoxically more viewer engagements than the understandable, actionable or good-quality videos, respectively. Most social distancing videos came from news agencies (68.8%). Hand-washing videos were mostly uploaded by health agencies or academic institutes (52.6%). The videos were less likely to be understandable and actionable and to be of good quality when uploaded by sources other than health agencies or academic institutes. The paucity of adequate information and the limited representation of 'authoritative' sources were concerning. Strategies for harnessing social media as an effective medium for public health education are necessary during pandemics.

A Study on the Correlation Between Media Usage Frequency and Audiences' Risk Perception, Emotion and Behavior

Whether risk events can be effectively controlled and mitigated is largely influenced by people's perceptions of risk events and their behavioral cooperation. Therefore, this study used a web-based questionnaire (N = 306) to investigate the specific factors influencing people's risk perceptions and behaviors, and included a test for the difference in the effect of positive and negative emotions of the audiences. The results show that the overall model has good explanatory power (R 2 = 61%) for the behavioral variables, and (1) how people's use of different media (especially TV and online media) significantly influenced their positive and negative emotions; (2) how people's frequency of TV use significantly influenced their risk susceptibility and how online media use significantly influenced their risk severity (with some differences in people's perceptions of efficacy between different media); (3) how people's sense of efficacy for risky events is the strongest predictor of their risk control behavior; and (4) that there are different mediating effects of different emotions and risk severity and sense of efficacy between the frequency of media use and risk control behavior.

Temporal, Spatial, and Socioeconomic Dynamics in Social Media Thematic Emphases during Typhoon Mangkhut

Disaster-related social media data often consist of several themes, and each theme allows people to understand and communicate from a certain perspective. It is necessary to take into consideration the dynamics of thematic emphases on social media in order to understand the nature of such data and to use them appropriately. This paper proposes a framework to analyze the temporal, spatial, and socioeconomic disparities in thematic emphases on social media during Typhoon Mangkhut. First, the themes were identified through a latent Dirichlet allocation model during Typhoon Mangkhut. Then, we adopted a quantitative method of indexing the themes to represent the dynamics of the thematic emphases. Spearman correlation analyses between the index and eight socioeconomic variables were conducted to identify the socioeconomic disparities in thematic emphases. The main research findings are revealing. From the perspective of time evolution, Theme 1 (general response) and Theme 2 (urban transportation) hold the principal position throughout the disaster. In the early hours of the disaster, Theme 3 (typhoon status and impact) was the most popular theme, but its popularity fell sharply soon after. From the perspective of spatial distribution, people in severely affected areas were more concerned about urban transportation (Theme 2), while people in moderately affected areas were more concerned about typhoon status and impact (Theme 3) and animals and humorous news (Theme 4). The results of the correlation analyses show that there are differences in thematic emphases across disparate socioeconomic groups. Women preferred to post about typhoon status and impact (Theme 3) and animals and humorous news (Theme 4), while people with higher income paid less attention to these two themes during Typhoon Mangkhut. These findings can help government agencies and other stakeholders address public needs effectively and accurately in disaster responses.

Capturing the Interplay between Risk Perception and Social Media Posting to Support Risk Response and Decision Making

This research aims to capture the interplay between risk perception and social media posting through a case study of COVID-19 in Wuhan to support risk response and decision making. Dividing users on Sina Weibo into the government, the media, the public, and other users, we address two main research questions: Whose posting affects risk perception and vice versa? How do different categories of social media users’ posts affect risk perception and vice versa? We use Granger causality analysis and impulse response functions to answer the research questions. The results show that from one perspective, the government and the media on Sina Weibo play critical roles in forming and affecting risk perceptions. From another perspective, risk perception promotes the posting of the media and the public on Sina Weibo. Since government’s posting and media’s posting can significantly enhance the public’s perceptions of risk issues, the government and the media must remain vigilant to provide credible risk-related information.

Differential effects of traditional and social media use on COVID-19 preventive behaviors: The mediating role of risk and efficacy perceptions

The study explored how traditional and social media use produced various cognitive responses toward COVID-19, including perceived severity, susceptibility, and efficacy, and direct and indirect facilitation of COVID-19 preventive behaviors. We tested the hypotheses on data collected from 433 university students in Wuhan, China, using structural equation modeling. We found that traditional media enhanced engagement for preventive behaviors both directly and indirectly by enhancing perceived severity and efficacy, whereas social media showed no impact on preventive behaviors, either directly or indirectly. Furthermore, the direct effect of traditional media on preventive behaviors was markedly stronger than the indirect effect through perceptions.

From Risk Butterflies to Citizens Engaged in Risk Prevention in the Zika Virus Crisis: Focusing on Personal, Societal and Global Risk Perceptions

This study investigates how posting information about the Zika virus on social media, and receiving information about Zika through the same platforms, are associated with personal, societal and global risk perceptions, and whether different types of risk perceptions are related to information seeking and preventive behavior intentions. A survey of U.S. participants (N = 958) revealed that posting information on social media is positively associated with personal and societal risk perceptions but not with global risk perceptions. Receiving information through social media, however, is positively associated with personal, societal and global risk perceptions. Personal and societal risk perceptions are associated with high information seeking intentions, which in turn leads to preventive behavioral intentions. The results suggest that so-called risk butterflies-those who frequently post information on social media-relate the health crisis to themselves and to their communities, and that these are important motivations for information-seeking and risk preventive behavior.