Maleki, M.; Bahrami, M.; Menendez, M.; Balsa-Barreiro, J. Social Behavior and COVID-19: Analysis of the Social Factors behind Compliance with Interventions across the United States. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health2022, 19, 15716.
Maleki, M.; Bahrami, M.; Menendez, M.; Balsa-Barreiro, J. Social Behavior and COVID-19: Analysis of the Social Factors behind Compliance with Interventions across the United States. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 15716.
Maleki, M.; Bahrami, M.; Menendez, M.; Balsa-Barreiro, J. Social Behavior and COVID-19: Analysis of the Social Factors behind Compliance with Interventions across the United States. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health2022, 19, 15716.
Maleki, M.; Bahrami, M.; Menendez, M.; Balsa-Barreiro, J. Social Behavior and COVID-19: Analysis of the Social Factors behind Compliance with Interventions across the United States. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 15716.
Abstract
Since its emergence, COVID-19 has caused a great impact in health and social terms. Governments and health authorities have attempted to minimize this impact by enforcing different mandates. Recent studies have addressed the relationship between various socioeconomic variables and compliance level to these interventions. However, little attention has been paid to what constitutes people's response and whether people behave differently when faced with different interventions. Data collected from different sources show very significant regional differences across the United States. In this paper, we attempted to shed light on the fact that a response may be different depending on the health system capacity and each individuals’ social status. For that, we analyzed the correlation between different societal variables (i.e. education, income levels, population density, etc.) along with healthcare capacity related variables (i.e. hospital occupancy rates, percentage of essential workers, etc.) with regards to people's level of compliance with three main governmental mandates in the United States: mobility restrictions, mask adoption, and vaccine participation. Our aim was to isolate the most influential variables impacting behavior in response to these policies. We found that there was a strong relationship between individuals' educational levels and political preferences with respect to compliance with each of these mandates.
Keywords
behavioral analysis; COVID-19; governmental intervention; mask adoption; movement change; vaccine participation; non-pharmaceutical interventions; policy recommendations; social physics; social behavior
Subject
Social Sciences, Sociology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
