a b s t r a c tSocial media tools are integrated in most parts of our daily lives, as citizens, netizens, researchers or emergency responders. Lessons learnt from disasters and emergencies that occurred globally in the last few years have shown that social media tools may serve as an integral and significant component of crisis response. Communication is one of the fundamental tools of emergency management. It becomes crucial when there are dozens of agencies and organizations responding to a disaster. Regardless of the type of emergency, whether a terrorist attack, a hurricane or an earthquake, communication lines may be overloaded and cellular networks overwhelmed as too many people attempt to use them to access information. Social scientists have presented that post-disaster active public participation was largely altruistic, including activities such as search and rescue, first aid treatment, victim evacuation, and online help. Social media provides opportunities for engaging citizens in the emergency management by both disseminating information to the public and accessing information from them. During emergency events, individuals are exposed to large quantities of information without being aware of their validity or risk of misinformation, but users are usually swift to correct them, thus making the social media "self-regulating".
Rationale
Due to lack of vaccine or cure, the COVID-19 pandemic presents a threat to all human beings, undermining people’s basic sense of safety and increasing distress symptoms.
Objective
To investigate the extent to which individual resilience, well-being and demographic characteristics may predict two indicators of Coronavirus pandemic: distress symptoms and perceived danger.
Method
Two independent samples were employed: 1) 605 respondents recruited through an internet panel company; 2) 741 respondents recruited through social media, using snowball sampling. Both samples filled a structured online questionnaire. Correlations between psychological/demographic variables and distress and perceived danger were examined. Path analysis was conducted to identify predictive indicators of distress and perceived danger.
Results
Significant negative correlations were found between individual/community resilience and sense of danger (-.220 and -.255 respectively; p <.001) and distress symptoms (- .398 and -.544 respectively; p <.001). Significant positive correlations were found between gender, community size, economic difficulties and sense of danger (.192, .117 and .244 respectively; p <.001). Gender and economic difficulties also positively correlated with distress symptoms (.130 and .214 respectively; p <.001). Path analysis revealed that all paths were significant ( p <.008 to .001) except between family income and distress symptoms ( p =.12). The seven predictors explained 20% of sense of danger variance and 34% the distress symptoms variance. The most highly predictive indicators were the two psychological characteristics, individual resilience, and well-being. Age, gender, community size, and economic difficulties due to COVID-19 further add to predicting distress, while community and national resilience do not. .
Conclusions
Individual resilience and well-being have been found as the first and foremost predictors of COVID-19 anxiety. Though both predictors are complex and may be influenced by many factors, given the potential return of COVID-19 threat and other future health pandemic threats to our world, we must rethink and develop ways to reinforce them.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing epidemic of coronavirus disease, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome, which has spread recently worldwide. Efforts to prevent the virus from spreading include travel restrictions, lockdowns as well as national or regional quarantines throughout the international community. The major negative psychological outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic is the anxiety caused by it. The aim of the present study was to examine the level of concern and the contributions of modes of resilience, well-being and demographic attributes towards decreasing or enhancing anxiety and depression among two samples: Israeli Jews (majority group) and Israeli Arabs (minority group). These random samples included 605 Jews and 156 Arabs who participated in an internet survey. A previous study, which has been conducted in the context of terror attacks, has shown that compared to Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs expressed a higher level of fear of war and lower levels of resilience supporting personality attributes. The results of the current study indicated a similar pattern that emerged in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: the Israeli Arabs reported a higher level of distress and a lower level of resilience and well-being.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.