Compliance with COVID-19 public health guidelines: an attitude-behaviour gap bridged by personal concern and distance to conspiracy ideation

Abstract

Objective: This study examined predictors of compliance with public health guidelines to curb transmission of COVID-19. Design: Applying an exploratory longitudinal design, participants (N = 431) from Germany and Austria completed surveys in April/ May 2020 (T1) and July/August 2020 (T2). Measures: Three outcome measures operationalised compliance with public health guidelines at T2: self-reported adherence (behavioural), agreement and opposition (attitudinal). At T1, demographics, perceived distress (PHQ-4, crisis of meaning), resources (self-control, meaningfulness), locus of control, conspiracy mentality and social media use were assessed. At T2, situational variables were added (person at risk, infection of close person, fear of infection, COVID-19 stress). Temporal shifts from T1 to T2 were examined as complementary information.Results: An attitude-behaviour gap at T2 was identified, as agreement with and opposition to the guidelines were only modestly correlated with adherence to them. Measures of personal concern (fear of infection, person at risk) were associated with both adherence and positive attitudes towards the measures. COVID-19 stress and conspiracy mentality predicted negative attitudes, but not adherence. Age predicted adherence positively, social media use negatively. Conclusion:The findings support the significance of personal concern for compliance with public health guidelines and suggest a critical impact of social media use and conspiracy mentality.

The impact of inspection policies on reducing disease prevalence in public buildings: A systems dynamics approach

“…The more risk-taking the bank staff are, the sooner the fear of inspection will disappear and the faster the bank staff will return to the past, i.e., non-compliance with the law. The impact of human behavior on law enforcement has been confirmed in several studies [ 60 , 63 , 64 ]. To better understand the concept of risk-taking used in this study, the degree of adherence to the law over time for three samples of bank staff with different risk-taking is shown in Fig.…”

“…However, due to long-term presence, work fatigue, and lack of supervision, there is a tendency for non-compliance with the protocols by building employees who work one shift (usually 6–10 hours a day) inside the building. Reports indicate that many employees inside public buildings disobey the law [ 60 ]. Given the daily presence of many citizens in public buildings, it seems that if adequate inspections of public buildings are not carried out, it will only lead to a widespread outbreak of the disease in the city.…”

Meaningfulness Buffers and Crisis of Meaning Mediates The Longitudinal Effect of Covid-19 Stress On General Mental Distress

“…At T1, a seven-item COVID-19 stress scale [2,32,33] was employed to determine the experience of acute stress due to the pandemic. Using a six-point Likert scale (0-5), it taps feelings of intolerability, boredom, anger, fear, and pessimism.…”

Knowing What We're Talking About: Facilitating Decentralized, Unequivocal Publication of and Reference to Psychological Construct Definitions and Instructions

“…Belinda explicitly described her unquestioning attitude towards it: 'I didn't really question it, I just assumed it was a good thing to do' (FG1)." Schnell et al (2021) report on a study into COVID-19 measure compliance. They explain that "[a]greement with and opposition to public health guidelines measured the participants' attitudes towards these guidelines.…”

“…These elements seem absent from the definition used by Taylor et al (2022), which instead contains elements of trust and moral norms. The definition of attitude used by Schnell et al (2021) appears to involve subjective evaluations of a policy as reasonable, well-explained, meaningful, oppressive, and illegal. Finally, both De Graaf et al ( 2017) and Wood et al (2014) use items close to the recommendations in the Reasoned Action Approach lineage theories (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010), where attitude is a generic evaluation of a behavior (but appearing to use different dimensions).…”