Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

1-2022

Abstract

This research purposes to examine the role of strategic communication, specifically the effectiveness of government's crisis communication mes-sages at the onset of COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore, on disease preven-tive behaviors. It employed a mixed method research approach by first carrying out a content analysis of 7128 news headlines on COVID-19 to confirm our presupposition that the media may be communicating mes-sages that the world order is being threatened. Informed by our findings that 90% of news reports were framed to suggest a dangerous world, we sur-veyed 453 respondents in the main study, and tested if people's beliefs in a dangerous world (BDW) were linked to their disease preventive behaviors (DPB), and whether such a link was modulated by how effective they per-ceived the government's pandemic communication. As predicted, results revealed that the perceived effectiveness of the government's pandemic communication trumped the effects of beliefs in a dangerous world such that the link between BDW and DPB was significant only when the perceived effectiveness was low. Further analysis of the effects of specific communica-tion dimensions on disease preventive behaviors suggests that public health communication needs to be strategically calibrated to offer personally rele-vant messages that are informative and objective

Discipline

Asian Studies | Health Psychology | Public Health

Research Areas

Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources

Publication

International Journal of Strategic Communication

Volume

16

Issue

3

First Page

485

Last Page

498

ISSN

1553-118X

Identifier

10.1080/1553118X.2022.2036742

Publisher

Taylor & Francis (Routledge): SSH Titles

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