Abstract
In absence of effective pharmaceutical treatments, the individual's compliance with a series of behavioral recommendations provided by the public health authorities play a critical role in the control and prevention of SARS-CoV2 infection. However, we still do not know much about the rate and determinants of adoption of the recommended health behaviors. This paper examines the compliance with the main behavioral recommendations, and compares sociocultural, psychosocial, and social cognitive explanations for its variation in the French population. Based on the current literature, these 3 categories of factors were identified as potential determinants of individual differences in the health preventive behaviors. The data used for these analyses are drawn from 2 cross-sectional studies (N = 2,000 in survey 1 and 2,003 in survey 2) conducted after the lockdown and before the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic in France. The participants were drawn from a larger internet consumer panel where recruitment was stratified to generate a socio-demographically representative sample of the French adult population. Overall, the results show a very high rate of compliance with the behavioral recommendations among the participants. A hierarchical regression analysis was then performed to assess the potential explanatory power of these approaches in complying with these recommendations by successively entering sociocultural factors, psychosocial factors, social cognitive factors in the model. Only the inclusion of the cognitive variables substantially increased the explained variance of the self-reported adoption of preventive behaviors (R2 change = 23% in survey 1 and 2), providing better support for the social cognitive than the sociocultural and psychosocial explanations.
Highlights
THEORITICAL BACKGROUNDWith the emergence and rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 through the world has raised the Specter of a novel and potentially catastrophic pandemic of a highly contagious and severe respiratory disease, with social, economic, and health consequences comparable to those of the well-known “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1917–18
These scores cannot be compared as the measurement method of the behavioral variables was slightly modified between the two surveys, with a shift from 2 to 4 response options to reduce the ceiling effect, i.e., the skewness and little variance observed in the compliance with the public health recommendations in the first survey
Congruent with the results of international studies conducted during the same period (Clark et al, 2020), our study show that the French population exhibited a high rate of compliance with the public health recommendations and guidelines, which questions the pessimistic view on the capacity of French people to adapt significantly and quickly their social norms in the face of a serious health threat
Summary
THEORITICAL BACKGROUNDWith the emergence and rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 through the world has raised the Specter of a novel and potentially catastrophic pandemic of a highly contagious and severe respiratory disease, with social, economic, and health consequences comparable to those of the well-known “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1917–18. In Europe, a variety of public health strategies have been adopted by governments and policy-makers to prevent the transmission of COVID-19 and control the epidemic at the national and regional level (Hunter et al, 2020). Most governments implemented a population strategy based on the administration of non-pharmaceutical interventions designed to control the spread of the disease through social and health behavior change (West et al, 2020). These public health interventions ranged from the non-coercive promotion of social distancing and improved hygiene measures (in Sweden) to government-imposed lockdowns (in France, Spain, or Italy)
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