Mosquito-Borne Diseases: Social Representations of a University Community in Endemic Outbreaks.

Sylvain Delouvée,Kathleen McColl,Grégory Lo Monaco,Gail Moloney

doi:10.3390/idr13020047

Abstract

(1) Background: Studying social representations as lay theories allows for a better understanding of the common sense knowledge constructed around mosquito-borne diseases and the impact this may have on attitudes and behaviors. (2) Methods: A hierarchical evocation questionnaire was circulated through an Australian academic community and analyzed by prototypical analysis and correspondence factor analysis. (3) Results: Representational areas are regulated by participant age and whether or not they had contracted a mosquito-borne disease. (4) Conclusions: Collecting and understanding social representations has the potential to help social actors implement strategies that encourage people to access information and adopt behaviors in line with the scientific reality of the phenomenon, rather than limiting lay theories.

Highlights

With the current pandemic, emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) form a central part of everyone’s news and daily life
Social representations are characterized by a function of orienting behaviors and practices, the emergence of this local outbreak of Ross River in this part of Australia provided an ideal context for a study of lay thinking about mosquito-borne diseases (MBDs)
The responses were categorized by the authors, independently, and using classical rules of content analysis [32,33,34]. This categorization resulted in 163 different categories (109 are hapax, association produced by a single participant, 66.87% of this corpus)

Summary

Introduction

With the current pandemic, emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) form a central part of everyone’s news and daily life. An EID is a label attached to various new or re-emerging diseases (COVID-19, Zika, Chikungunya, HIV/AIDS, avian flu). We are not specialists in virology or epidemiology, we note that most of these infectious diseases are known by the general public, primarily through the dissemination of information and images through the press, radio and television. The media has seized on these new diseases, with digital social networks disseminating possible public health prevention messages [2] as well as fake news [3,4]. Many studies have focused on the link between knowledge, attitudes, and practices in relation to mosquito-borne diseases: Chikungunya virus [5,6], dengue [7], malaria (especially in India due to the widespread nature of this disease [8,9,10,11]) or Zika virus [12,13]

Methods

Results

Conclusion