Care Starts at Home: Emotional State and Appeals to Altruism may Reduce Demand for Overused Health Services in the UK

Prosocial Behaviour and Antibiotic Resistance: Evidence from a Discrete Choice Experiment

INTRODUCTION

The health of a community depends on the health of its individuals; therefore, individual health behaviour can implicitly affect the health of the entire community. This is particularly evident in the case of infectious diseases. Because the level of prosociality in a community might determine the effectiveness of health programmes, prosocial behaviour may be a crucial disease-control resource. This study aimed to extend the literature on prosociality and investigate the role of altruism in antibiotic decision making.

METHODS

A discrete choice experiment was conducted to assess the influence of altruism on the general public's preferences regarding antibiotic treatment options. The survey was completed by 378 Swedes. Latent class analysis models were used to estimate antibiotic treatment characteristics and preference heterogeneity. A three-class model resulted in the best model fit, and altruism significantly impacted preference heterogeneity.

RESULTS

Our findings suggest that people with higher altruism levels had more pronounced preferences for treatment options with lower contributions to antibiotic resistance and a lower likelihood of treatment failure. Furthermore, altruism was statistically significantly associated with sex, education, and health literacy.

CONCLUSIONS

Antibiotic awareness, trust in healthcare systems, and non-discriminatory priority setting appear to be structural elements conducive to judicious and prosocial antibiotic behaviour. This study suggests that prosocial messages could help to decrease the demand for antibiotic treatments.

Social responsibility and subjective well-being of volunteers for COVID-19: The mediating role of job involvement

Aim

Our study aimed to investigate the effect of social responsibility on the subjective well-being of volunteers for COVID-19 and to examine the mediating role of job involvement in this relationship.

Background

Nowadays, more and more people join volunteer service activities. As we all know, volunteer work contributes to society without any return. Volunteers often have a strong sense of social responsibility and reap subjective well-being in their dedication. Although research shows that social responsibility will drive them to participate in volunteer work actively, it is less clear whether job involvement will impact their subjective well-being.

Methods

The data were collected in the precaution zone in Shanghai, China, from April to May 2022. A sample of 302 volunteers for COVID-19 completed the social responsibility scale, subjective well-being scale and job involvement scale in the form of an electronic questionnaire on their mobile phones. A structural equation model was adopted to verify the research hypotheses.

Results

Social responsibility was significantly and positively related to volunteers’ subjective well-being and job involvement (p < 0.05). Job involvement fully mediates the relationship between volunteers’ social responsibility and subjective well-being.

Conclusion

Social responsibility is critical to predicting volunteers’ subjective well-being. Job involvement plays an intervening mechanism in explaining how social responsibility promotes volunteers’ subjective well-being.