What Should I do and Who's to blame? A cross-national study on youth's attitudes and beliefs in times of COVID-19

Elisabeth L De Moor; Ting-Yu Cheng; Jenna E Spitzer; Christian Berger; Alexia Carrizales; Claire F Garandeau; Maria Gerbino; Skyler T Hawk; Goda Kaniušonytė; Asiye Kumru; Elisabeth Malonda; Anna Rovella; Yuh-Ling Shen; Laura K Taylor; Maarten van Zalk; Susan Branje; Gustavo Carlo; Laura Padilla Walker; Jolien Van der Graaff

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0279366

What Should I do and Who's to blame? A cross-national study on youth's attitudes and beliefs in times of COVID-19

PLoS One. 2022 Dec 21;17(12):e0279366. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0279366. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Elisabeth L De Moor¹, Ting-Yu Cheng¹, Jenna E Spitzer², Christian Berger³, Alexia Carrizales⁴, Claire F Garandeau⁵, Maria Gerbino⁶, Skyler T Hawk⁷, Goda Kaniušonytė⁸, Asiye Kumru⁹, Elisabeth Malonda¹⁰, Anna Rovella¹¹, Yuh-Ling Shen¹², Laura K Taylor¹³, Maarten van Zalk¹⁴, Susan Branje¹, Gustavo Carlo¹⁵, Laura Padilla Walker¹⁶, Jolien Van der Graaff¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Youth and Family, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
² Department of Developmental Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
³ School of Psychology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
⁴ Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.
⁵ INVEST Flagship, University of Turku, Turku, Finland.
⁶ Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
⁷ Educational Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
⁸ Institute of Psychology, Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania.
⁹ Department of Psychology, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey.
¹⁰ Department of Basic Psychology, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain.
¹¹ Psychology Department, San Luis National University, San Luis, Argentina.
¹² Department of Psychology, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan.
¹³ School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
¹⁴ Developmental Psychology, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany.
¹⁵ School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
¹⁶ School of Family Life, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, United States of America.

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis has had a major impact on youth. This study examined factors associated with youth's attitudes towards their government's response to the pandemic and their blaming of individuals from certain risk groups, ethnic backgrounds, and countries or regions. In a sample of 5,682 young adults (Mage = 22) from 14 countries, lower perceived burden due to COVID-19, more collectivistic and less individualistic values, and more empathy were associated with more positive attitudes towards the government and less blaming of individuals of certain groups. Youth's social identification with others in the pandemic mediated these associations in the same direction, apart from the COVID-19 burden on attitudes, which had a positive indirect effect. No evidence of country-level moderation was found.

Copyright: © 2022 De Moor et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adolescent
Attitude
COVID-19* / epidemiology
Government
Humans
Young Adult

Grants and funding

JvdG received a grant from the Faculty of Social Sciences of Utrecht University to fund data collection (no grant number available). URL: https://www.uu.nl/en/organisation/faculty-of-social-and-behavioural-sciences ELdM and SB were supported by a grant from the European Research Council (ERC-CoG INTRANSITION-773023). URL: https://erc.europa.eu/ The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.