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How did socio-demographic status and personal attributes influence compliance to COVID-19 preventive behaviours during the early outbreak in Japan? Lessons for pandemic management

journal contribution
posted on 2021-09-17, 00:30 authored by Shahadat Uddin, Tasadduq ImamTasadduq Imam, Matloob Khushi, Arif Khan, Mohammad Ali Moni
This study focuses on how socio-demographic status and personal attributes influence self-protective behaviours during a pandemic, with protection behaviours being assessed through three perspectives – social distancing, personal protection behaviour and social responsibility awareness. The research considers a publicly available and recently collected dataset on Japanese citizens during the COVID-19 early outbreak and utilises a data analysis framework combining Classification and Regression Tree (CART), a data mining approach, and regression analysis to gain deep insights. The analysis reveals Socio-demographic attributes – sex, marital family status and having children – as having played an influential role in Japanese citizens' abiding by the COVID-19 protection behaviours. Especially women with children are noted as more conscious than their male counterparts. Work status also appears to have some impact concerning social distancing. Trust in government also appears as a significant factor. The analysis further identifies smoking behaviour as a factor characterising subjective prevention actions with non-smokers or less-frequent smokers being more compliant to the protection behaviours. Overall, the findings imply the need of public policy campaigning to account for variations in protection behaviour due to socio-demographic and personal attributes during pandemics and national emergencies.

History

Volume

175

Start Page

1

End Page

10

Number of Pages

10

eISSN

1873-3549

ISSN

0191-8869

Location

England

Publisher

Elsevier

Language

eng

Peer Reviewed

  • Yes

Open Access

  • No

Acceptance Date

2021-01-22

External Author Affiliations

The University of Sydney; The University of New South wales

Era Eligible

  • Yes

Medium

Print-Electronic

Journal

Personality and Individual Differences

Article Number

110692