COVID-19 compliance across societies: testing health messaging models in the U.S. and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
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The purpose of this study is to test the theories of communication about health crises and theories of persuasive health communication that have been applied to COVID-19 in a different cultural context in order to understand these theories need to be adapted for a global pandemic. In order to explore this realm, the conceptual framework established by the health belief model is expanded by adding two components. The first component is to understand the role of authoritarianism and the way it interacts with psychological reactance. The second component is to understand the role of collectivism in the way it interacts with the subjective norms component of the integrated model. By utilizing message cues, this study used an experimental design to empirically test whether using the norms and authoritarianism cues affect behavioral intentions to follow government-enforced health policies to contain COVID-19. The findings of this study indicate that the authoritarian cue generated psychological reactance in both cultural contexts; the Western and undemocratic. This suggests that psychological reactance goes beyond being related to a specific cultural context. Furthermore, I found that social norm manipulation may not be able to break through peoples' actual perceptions of what members of their community think. The results of this study led to conclude that cultural differences do exist, but the tools to theorize about these differences need to be developed and refined. The findings reported in this study highlight contributions to the use of theories of communication about health crises and theories of persuasive health communication in non-Western contexts in both research and practice.
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Ph. D.