How did socio-demographic status and personal attributes influence compliance to COVID-19 preventive behaviours during the early outbreak in Japan? Lessons for pandemic management

Shahadat Uddin; Tasadduq Imam; Matloob Khushi; Arif Khan; Mohammad Ali

doi:10.1016/j.paid.2021.110692

How did socio-demographic status and personal attributes influence compliance to COVID-19 preventive behaviours during the early outbreak in Japan? Lessons for pandemic management

Pers Individ Dif. 2021 Jun:175:110692. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2021.110692. Epub 2021 Jan 27.

Authors

Shahadat Uddin¹, Tasadduq Imam², Matloob Khushi³, Arif Khan⁴, Mohammad Ali^{5

6}

Affiliations

¹ School of Project Management, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Sydney, Room 5050, ABS Building, Darlington, NSW 2008, Australia.
² School of Business and Law, CQUniversity (Melbourne), VIC 3000, L4, 120 Spencer Street, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia.
³ School of Computer Science, J12, Computer Science Building, The University of Sydney, Australia.
⁴ Faculty of Engineering, J12, Computer Science Building, The University of Sydney, Australia.
⁵ WHO Collaborating Centre on eHealth, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, The University of New South wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
⁶ WHO Collaborating Centre on eHealth, UNSW Digital Health, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, UNSW, Sydney, Australia.

Abstract

This study focuses on how socio-demographic status and personal attributes influence self-protective behaviours during a pandemic, with protection behaviours being assessed through three perspectives - social distancing, personal protection behaviour and social responsibility awareness. The research considers a publicly available and recently collected dataset on Japanese citizens during the COVID-19 early outbreak and utilises a data analysis framework combining Classification and Regression Tree (CART), a data mining approach, and regression analysis to gain deep insights. The analysis reveals Socio-demographic attributes - sex, marital family status and having children - as having played an influential role in Japanese citizens' abiding by the COVID-19 protection behaviours. Especially women with children are noted as more conscious than their male counterparts. Work status also appears to have some impact concerning social distancing. Trust in government also appears as a significant factor. The analysis further identifies smoking behaviour as a factor characterising subjective prevention actions with non-smokers or less-frequent smokers being more compliant to the protection behaviours. Overall, the findings imply the need of public policy campaigning to account for variations in protection behaviour due to socio-demographic and personal attributes during pandemics and national emergencies.

Keywords: COVID-19; Personal attribute; Personal protection behaviour; Quality of life; Social distancing; Social responsibility awareness; Socio-demographic status.