Testing influences of openness, conscientiousness, nationalism, media diversity, social class, and informational echo chambers on support for official responses to COVID-19 in Wuhan in November, 2020

TL;DR

This study explores what influences public support for government actions during the 2020 Wuhan COVID-19 outbreak, focusing on personality traits, media habits, and social factors.

Contribution

The study introduces a comprehensive model combining personal, behavioral, and environmental factors to explain support for governmental pandemic responses.

Findings

Conscientiousness and nationalism positively influence support for official pandemic responses.

Media diversity and echo chamber behaviors significantly affect public support through mediating roles.

The model integrates personal, behavioral, and environmental factors to explain political attitudes during the pandemic.

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, controversies about governmental responses to the epidemic also emerged in China. Previous studies mainly described the phenomenon of individual differences on support for governmental responses to COVID-19 with less attention to the underlying causal mechanisms. Thus, this study tries to verify the factors influencing public support for official behaviors in COVID-19.

A questionnaire survey was drew on in Wuhan city during the COVID-19 outbreak. The quota sampling method was adopted according to the gender and age structure of the population in Wuhan as well as the educational structure of the urban population in China.

Through structural equation analysis, this study confirms that personal factors (namely conscientiousness and nationalistic ideology), behavioral factors (namely media diversity and echo chamber acts) exert significantly positive impacts on support for governmental responses. The echo chamber acts play important mediating roles in the relationship between each independent variable and support for governmental responses.

The originality of this study is that it constructs a comprehensive model of influencing factors of support for governmental responses with the personal, behavioral, and environmental factors. While contributing insight to political attitude in China, the research results also have significance for promoting public trust and constructing healthy public opinion in China.

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