During the COVID-19 pandemic, the speed with which available health and safety information evolved was novel to most people around the world. To assess how the public handled the changing guidance, an international research team compared information consumption among citizens of Germany and the United States. They found the two countries displayed some similarities in how people consumed pandemic news, but differences emerged between German and U.S. citizens who lean right politically.
The findings were published in the journal Health Communication by Jessica Gall Myrick, the Donald P. Bellisario Professor of Health Communication at Penn State, and Helena Bilandzic, professor of communication research at the University of Augsburg.
Myrick planned to enroll at Bilandzic in Germany as a visiting professor at the University of Augsburg in the summer of 2020. The pandemic canceled their plans, but the conversations that followed spawned the concept for this project.
“There were scientists on TV and doing podcasts in both countries who were actively talking about COVID-19 and the newly developing science around it,” Myrick said. “We were noticing some similarities and some differences between our countries in media coverage and public reactions to these very public conversations about medical science.
“We decided to look at the differences between the two countries and also investigate the role of political ideology motivating people to seek more information about COVID-19. While Germany has right-wing and left-wing politics, too, medicine and science are not as strongly polarized as in the United States, so it made for an interesting comparison.”
Myrick said the task is a first step in comparing the effects of communication on public fitness in a crisis in those two countries. While this specific study is limited to two Western countries with similar resources, Myrick said these types of studies can help hoping fitness communicators. how citizens around the world could seek information, or avoid it, in the event of another infectious disease outbreak.
The researchers assessed how citizens in both countries accumulated and processed COVID-19 media politics during the first three months of the pandemic. Using the same questionnaire in English and translated into German, Bilandzic and Myrick surveyed more than six hundred people each. country online in late spring 2020. Respondents were asked about their perceptions of COVID-19 and their media use in the early months of the pandemic.
“The pandemic is a great example of a very stressful time where we had a lot more people wanting health information and trying to figure out what it meant for them and their families,” Myrick said. “At first everybody really wanted the information, but then it became overwhelming, or people got sick of it. We saw that many people appeared to begin avoiding new information, purposefully dodging it even when useful or relevant.”
According to the researchers, one of the reasons for this data avoidance is the political and cultural context in which a user obtained news.
“In other countries, political ideology has application in shaping the pandemic timeline and the presence of other types of COVID-related resources and data in the media and social networks,” Myrick said. “Considering the role of political ideology in data behaviors, seeking or avoiding data can help locate the deeper roots of functional and dysfunctional processes. In other words, if political ideology is somewhat restrictive in the search for data, the challenge does not lie in the availability or understanding of the data. the challenge.
To investigate, the researchers asked respondents how seriously they took COVID-19, and how aware they were of existing events and the pressure point they gained from their family and social groups to be informed.
According to the results, ideology influenced data consumption. Participants on the left perceived COVID-19 as a higher risk than participants on the right. In both countries, right-wing participants had lower reporting standards, meaning there was less social and circle pressure from influence. teams of family members to stay up-to-date with the latest COVID-19 data. However, in the U. S. , proponents of right-wing ideology considered COVID to be less severe than their German counterparts.
“Conservatives in the U. S. , in our sample, considered COVID-19 to be less dangerous,” Myrick said. “They weren’t as worried or scared about the pandemic. In Germany, right-wingers felt it wasn’t mandatory to know everything about COVID-19 right now, however, they claimed that COVID-19 can have serious consequences and reported more potent negative sentiments about the pandemic than conservatives in the U. S. sample. “We are not going to be able to do anything
Myrick said this is vital because emotional reaction and perceived severity are two things that influence a person’s behavior. In this case, those behaviors can come from simply putting on a mask, social distancing, or getting vaccinated when available.
“COVID-19 was unique in so many ways, because we started learning about the biology and new scientific terms, and we were learning them from different spokespeople,” Myrick said. “It was the same in other countries. We need to keep working as health communicators to make sure we get information to people in a way they can process and understand, even when they’re stressed out and anxious.”
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