Coping with Zika: How Health Crisis Appraisal Predicts Intended Preventive Behavior Yan Jin, Associate Professor, University of Georgia Yen-I Lee, Doctoral Student, University of Georgia Jeanine Guidry, Ph.D. Candidate, Virginia Commonwealth University Marcus Messner, Associate Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University Shana Meganck, Assistant Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University Jay Adams, Assistant Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University *This project is funded by UGA Department of Advertising and Public Relations
Background The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a travel advisory warning pregnant women about avoiding travel to Zika transmission regions. CDC also has asked health care professionals to report flu-like symptoms in patients who have traveled to and from affected countries. Conversations filled with panic about the Zika virus have quickly surfaced on social media platforms. Feelings of anxiety and fear also tend to go viral, and the presence of social media, visual postings in particular, seems to escalate the speed at which the perceived “public health crisis” spreads.
Purpose of the Study To focus on how the publics appraise the threat of the Zika virus, as communicated by a government agency. To examine how publics perceive the severity of the health crisis. To look at how publics feel anxious about the situation. To discover whether publics plan to seek further information on social media and non-social media channels. The study also further examine how perceived severity, anxiety, and information seeking behavior predict the tendency of taking government health agency recommended prevention behavior as a strategic health communication outcome measure.
Literature Review: Integrated Crisis Mapping (ICM) Model To better understand publics’ “minds and hearts” during crisis (Jin, Pang, & Cameron, 2007, p.266) Maps crises on two continua: Organization’ engagement in crises Primary publics’ coping strategies Asserts anger, fright, sadness, and anxiety are primary crisis emotions Anxiety is the default in crisis
Literature Review: Jin, Liu and Fraustino (2016) examined publics’ emotional coping in a hypothetical terrorist attack, focuseing on the conative coping aspect recommended by ICM, driven by publics’ action tendency (i.e., the feeling that publics can, and must, do something about the situation). This study further examines Jin et al.’s (2016) approach in a real public health crisis situation – Zika outbreak. Zika Information Seeking Zika Information Sharing Protective Action: Following CDC Instruction Core behavioral outcomes posited by the social-mediated crisis communication model (SMCC)
Research Questions RQ1 set EMOTIONS RQ2 set Severity RQ1.1: How, if at all, does anxiety predict publics’ Zika information seeking behaviors? RQ1.2: How, if at all, does anxiety predict publics’ Zika information sharing behaviors? RQ1.3: How, if at all, does anxiety predict publics’ behavior of taking protective actions instructed by CDC? RQ2 set Severity RQ2.1: How do publics’ perceived severity of Zika predict their Zika information seeking behavior? RQ2.2: How do publics’ publics’ perceived severity of Zika predict their Zika information sharing behavior? RQ2.3: How do publics’ publics’ perceived severity of Zika predict their behavior of taking protective actions recommended by CDC?
Method 185 U.S. adults were recruited to read a zika message sent by CDC, and were asked to fill with the online survey questions in April 2016. Gender: There were 91 females (49.2%) and 94 males (50.8%). Age group n Percentage 18-24 23 12.4% 25-34 29 15.7% 35-44 32 17.3% 45-54 40 21.6% 55-64 25 13.5% 65-74 75+ 7 3.8%
Ethnicity n Percentage White, Non-Hispanic 141 76.2% Black, Non-Hispanic 13 7.0% Other, Non-Hispanic 5 2.7% Hispanic 21 11.4% 2+ races, Non-Hispanic Marital Status n Percentage Married 96 51.9% Widowed 10 5.4% Divorced 16 8.6% Separated 2 1.1% Never married 46 24.9% Living with partner 15 8.1% Region n Percentage Northeast 33 17.8% Midwest 30 16.2% South 69 37.3% West 53 28.6%
Results: Hierarchical Regression Model Predictors Adj. R2 F β t p 1 Severity .139 30.828*** .380 5.552 .000 2 .205 24.748*** .291 4.189 Anxious .279 4.015 3 .313 21.959*** .228 3.479 .001 .210 3.115 .002 Social Media Information Seeking -.271 -3.572 Non-Social Media Information Seeking .439 5.499
Discussion Our hierarchical regression analyses reveal significant influences of health risk appraisal, felt emotion, and coping via information seeking activities on participants’ likelihood of taking health authority recommended actions to protect themselves against the Zika virus. One of the surprising but interesting findings is that people less follow the CDC instruction while they use more social media as a tool for information seeking. This indicates that health professionals and practitioners should consider the issue of information overwhelming for recipients when the health crisis comes out.
Implications Practical Theoretical Segmenting publics by emotions and perceived crisis severity No single channel most effective for public health crisis Social media might contribute negatively in public health crisis preparedness Theoretical ICM model verification & expansion in health crisis context Examine conative coping actions presented by SMCC research in health crisis Anxiety drives different behavioral outcomes Crisis perception (e.g., perceived severity) is important
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