The Effects of Dangerous World Beliefs on COVID-19 Preventive Behaviors in Singapore: The Moderating Role of Public Health Communication

ABSTRACT This research purposes to examine the role of strategic communication, specifically the effectiveness of government's crisis communication messages at the onset of COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore, on disease preventive 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 messages that the world order is being threatened. Informed by our findings that 90% of news reports were framed to suggest a dangerous world, we surveyed 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 perceived 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 communication dimensions on disease preventive behaviors suggests that public health communication needs to be strategically calibrated to offer personally relevant messages that are informative and objective. (199 words)