Social Media Use, Self-Efficacy, Perceived Threat, and Preventive Behavior in Times of COVID-19: Results of a Cross-Sectional Study in Pakistan.

Qaisar Khalid Mahmood,Sahifa Mukhtar,Sara Rizvi Jafree,Florian Fischer

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.562042

Abstract

Although the role of social media in infectious disease outbreaks is receiving increasing attention, little is known about the mechanisms by which social media use affects risk perception and preventive behaviors during such outbreaks. This study aims to determine whether there are any relationships between social media use, preventive behavior, perceived threat of coronavirus, self-efficacy, and socio-demographic characteristics. The data were collected from 310 respondents across Pakistan using an online cross-sectional survey. Reliability analyses were performed for all scales and structural equational modeling was used to identify the relationships between study variables. We found that: (i) social media use predicts self-efficacy (β = 0.25, p < 0.05) and perceived threat of coronavirus (β = 0.54, p < 0.05, R2 = 0.06), and (ii) preventive behavior is predicted by self-efficacy and perceived threat of coronavirus (R = 0.10, p < 0.05). Therefore, these results indicate the importance of social media's influence on health-related behaviors. These findings are valuable for health administrators, governments, policymakers, and social scientists, specifically for individuals whose situations are similar to those in Pakistan.

Highlights

The current COVID-19 pandemic is the most significant public health crisis of this century (World Health Organization, 2020)
This study aims to examine how social media has played an essential role in formulating preventive behavior during the COVID-19 outbreak in Pakistan
The crippling consequences of the lockdown have been felt in all spheres of life (Bae et al, 2021), including a crumbling health system (Miller et al, 2020; Mahmood et al, 2021), panic buying (Ahmad and Murad, 2020; Arafat et al, 2020), a severe and difficult-to-resolve economic and labor crisis (Sukharev, 2020), high levels of distress (Cullen et al, 2020), and so on

Summary

Introduction

The current COVID-19 pandemic is the most significant public health crisis of this century (World Health Organization, 2020). In a severe public health emergency like this, people seek information from all available sources—including traditional media, interpersonal communication, and social media (Perez-Lugo, 2004). Traditional media play an important role in mobilizing the community, providing authoritative information and emotional support, helping isolated people feel connected, and allocating resources (Wicke and Silver, 2009). In such circumstances, people seek information from the media in order to understand the severity. People have had to rely much more heavily on social media to keep informed and stay connected (Liu, 2021). Scholars have studied the influential mechanism of health risk information on social media on individual cognition, attitudes, and actions (Lin et al, 2020)

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