Social distancing in America: Understanding long-term adherence to COVID-19 mitigation recommendations

Abstract

A crucial question in the governance of infectious disease outbreaks is how to ensure that people continue to adhere to mitigation measures for the longer duration. The present paper examines this question by means of a set of cross-sectional studies conducted in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, in May, June, and July of 2020. Using stratified samples that mimic the demographic characteristics of the U.S. population, it seeks to understand to what extent Americans continued to adhere to social distancing measures in the period after the first lockdown ended. Moreover, it seeks to uncover which variables sustained (or undermined) adherence across this period. For this purpose, we examined a broad range of factors, relating to people’s (1) knowledge and understanding of the mitigation measures, (2) perceptions of their costs and benefits, (3) perceptions of legitimacy and procedural justice, (4) personal factors, (5) social environment, and (6) practical circumstances. Our findings reveal that adherence was chiefly shaped by three major factors: respondents adhered more when they (a) had greater practical capacity to adhere, (b) morally agreed more with the measures, and (c) perceived the virus as a more severe health threat. Adherence was shaped to a lesser extent by impulsivity, knowledge of social distancing measures, opportunities for violating, personal costs, and descriptive social norms. The results also reveal, however, that adherence declined across this period, which was partly explained by changes in people’s moral alignment, threat perceptions, knowledge, and perceived social norms. These findings show that adherence originates from a broad range of factors that develop dynamically across time. Practically these insights help to improve pandemic governance, as well as contributing theoretically to the study of compliance and the way that rules come to shape behavior.

Factors associated with change in adherence to COVID-19 personal protection measures in the Metropolitan Region, Chile

“…This is partly explained by the fact that women had a higher baseline adherence than men. Some studies have also reported the higher adherence to physical distancing of women in the pandemic first year [ 24 , 30 , 31 ]. However, the higher initial adherence of women led to a more pronounced relaxation until reaching a similar adherence to this measure in 2021 than men.…”

Population Adherence to Infection Control Behaviors during Hong Kong’s First and Third COVID-19 Waves: A Serial Cross-Sectional Study

“…As a likely result of intermittent prohibitions against evening dine-in services in Hong Kong restaurants since July 2020 [ 28 , 29 , 30 ], the use of food delivery/take out services greatly increased between the two study periods. Restaurant delivery services, which were rare in Hong Kong due to the close proximity of eating establishments to residential areas, quickly became available using mobile applications during this COVID-19 pandemic.…”

“…A number of studies conducted in the U.S., Europe and Africa had observed a gradual decline in adherence to COVID-19 preventive measures as the pandemic evolved [ 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 ]. However, other studies have noted that adherence to hygiene measures and social distancing recommendations have remained high during this pandemic [ 30 , 31 ] and that the intention to adhere to protective measures was also high [ 32 , 33 ].…”

A Network Approach to Compliance: A Complexity Science Understanding of How Rules Shape Behavior

“…Recent work has shown that empirical network models can provide insight into the interplay of psychological factors that are important in relation to COVID-19-related behavior (Chambon et al, 2021 , 2022 ; Taylor et al, 2020 ). Furthermore, it represents a setting in which core variables from all five major compliance theories have been hypothesized to be at play (for a review, see Kooistra & van Rooij, 2020 ; also see Reinders Folmer et al, 2021 ). These features make this a setting that is ideally suited for understanding how these variables may interrelate with individual compliance in a complex network.…”

“…Accordingly, we expect that compliance with mitigation measures will be lower among more impulsive people, and among people who experience more negative emotions as a result of the pandemic. More generally, capacity theories thus imply that people will comply more with mitigation measures the more they are able to do so (Reinders Folmer et al, 2021 ).…”