Why do parents refuse to self-protect? Socio-cultural factors influencing the immediate response of the older generation to COVID-19 and their spatial heterogeneity in China

Abstract

Immediately after the initial COVID-19 outbreak in January 2020 in China, an intriguing trend of distrust and anti-protection among the older generation appeared. Based on 1926 samples collected across the Chinese mainland within a short timeframe, this paper adopted a series of global and spatial statistical techniques to explore the socio-cultural reasons underlying the older generation's risk response and their spatial heterogeneity in China. First, the global Ordinary Least Square (OLS) model validated the significant effects of trust in government information, cultural traditions, and social conformity, but the spatial autocorrelation (Moran's I) test of the residuals suggested spatial nonstationarity of the model. Second, the results from the Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) confirmed the spatial heterogeneity of the older generation's protective patterns. An ‘inverted T-shaped’ high-protection belt centering on Wuhan City was identified, indicating that physical proximity to and social connectedness with the pandemic epicenter is crucial in motivating the older generation's protection. In areas distant from and less connected with the risk center, strong collectivistic values may play a vital role in stimulating trust in government information and fostering positive protective intentions of the older generation. However, in most areas, such strong government trust is absent, and the inhibitory cultural and social factors often prevail to result in an anti-protection norm of the older generation. Finally, suggestions were provided to develop locally effective risk management measures from the socio-cultural perspective, and more geographic investigations on public risk response were proposed.