Pang Zhenjing, Zhao Ce, Xue Lan
School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Oct 21;13:781279. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.781279. eCollection 2022.
This study systematically examined people's protective behaviors against COVID-19 in China, and particular attention was given to people's perceived threat and information-processing strategies. This study constructed a conceptual model and used structural equation modeling to explore this issue, and a questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data involving 4,605 participants during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. The results showed that people's initial information acquisition played an essential role in their behavioral responses; acquiring more initial information about COVID-19 would make them perceive a higher threat and present a higher demand for information, then making them more likely to seek and process information, and subsequently motivating their protective behaviors. In addition to increasing people's information needs, the perceived threat could also strengthen the analytical assessment and affect protective behavior positively but failed to predict the experiential assessment. Driven by information need, information seeking significantly influenced protective behavior; it also facilitated analytical assessment and decreased experiential assessment, thus predicting people's protective behaviors. Protective behaviors were spurred by analytical assessment but negatively influenced by the experiential assessment.
本研究系统地考察了中国民众针对新冠疫情的防护行为，特别关注了民众的感知威胁和信息处理策略。本研究构建了一个概念模型，并使用结构方程模型来探究这一问题，同时开展了问卷调查，以收集中国新冠疫情早期阶段4605名参与者的数据。结果表明，民众的初始信息获取在其行为反应中起着至关重要的作用；获取更多关于新冠疫情的初始信息会使他们感知到更高的威胁，并表现出更高的信息需求，进而使他们更有可能寻求和处理信息，随后激发他们的防护行为。除了增加民众的信息需求外，感知威胁还能加强分析评估并对防护行为产生积极影响，但未能预测经验评估。在信息需求的驱动下，信息寻求对防护行为有显著影响；它还促进了分析评估并降低了经验评估，从而预测了民众的防护行为。防护行为受到分析评估的推动，但受到经验评估的负面影响。
