University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
PLoS One. 2021 Apr 21;16(4):e0249914. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249914. eCollection 2021.
Studies of citizens' compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures routinely rely on survey data. While such data are essential, public health restrictions provide clear signals of what is socially desirable in this context, creating a potential source of response bias in self-reported measures of compliance. In this research, we examine whether the results of a guilt-free strategy recently proposed to lessen this constraint are generalizable across twelve countries, and whether the treatment effect varies across subgroups. Our findings show that the guilt-free strategy is a useful tool in every country included, increasing respondents' proclivity to report non-compliance by 9 to 16 percentage points. This effect holds for different subgroups based on gender, age and education. We conclude that the inclusion of this strategy should be the new standard for survey research that aims to provide crucial data on the current pandemic.
研究公民对 COVID-19 预防措施的遵守情况通常依赖于调查数据。虽然这些数据是必不可少的，但公共卫生限制为在这种情况下什么是社会所期望的提供了明确的信号，这在自我报告的遵守措施中产生了潜在的反应偏差来源。在这项研究中，我们检验了最近提出的一种减轻这种限制的无内疚策略的结果是否可以推广到十二个国家，以及治疗效果是否因亚组而异。我们的研究结果表明，在每个被包括的国家，无内疚策略都是一个有用的工具，使被调查者报告不遵守规定的倾向增加了 9 到 16 个百分点。这种效果适用于基于性别、年龄和教育的不同亚组。我们的结论是，应该将这一策略纳入旨在提供有关当前大流行病的关键数据的调查研究的新标准。
