The effects of dangerous world beliefs on COVID-19 preventive behaviors in Singapore: The moderating role of public health communication

• Main Authors: YEO, Su Lin, PHUA, Desiree Y., HONG, Ying-Yi
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Asian Studies; Health Psychology; Public Health
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/7425; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/lkcsb_research/article/8424/viewcontent/The_Effects_of_Dangerous_World_Beliefs_on_COVID_19_Preventive_Behaviors_in_Singapore_The_Moderating_Role_of_Public_Health_Communication.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This research purposes to examine the role of strategic communication, specifically the effectiveness of government's crisis communication mes-sages at the onset of COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore, on disease preven-tive behaviors. It employed a mixed method research approach by first carrying out a content analysis of 7128 news headlines on COVID-19 to confirm our presupposition that the media may be communicating mes-sages that the world order is being threatened. Informed by our findings that 90% of news reports were framed to suggest a dangerous world, we sur-veyed 453 respondents in the main study, and tested if people's beliefs in a dangerous world (BDW) were linked to their disease preventive behaviors (DPB), and whether such a link was modulated by how effective they per-ceived the government's pandemic communication. As predicted, results revealed that the perceived effectiveness of the government's pandemic communication trumped the effects of beliefs in a dangerous world such that the link between BDW and DPB was significant only when the perceived effectiveness was low. Further analysis of the effects of specific communica-tion dimensions on disease preventive behaviors suggests that public health communication needs to be strategically calibrated to offer personally rele-vant messages that are informative and objective