Are the Covid-19 health measures forced or accepted? How the governmental Covid-19 communication evokes a perceived threat to freedom, reactance and influences acceptance and adherence to health protection measures in Austria
Creators: name: Stubenvoll, Marlis
name: Saumer, Melanie
name: Matthes, Jörg
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Communication
subject: Mass Communication
subject: Social Influence and Political Communication
subject: Models and Methods
subject: Health Psychology
subject: Health Communication
subject: Political Science
subject: FOS: Political science
subject: Cognition and Perception
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: Covid-19
subject: Governmental Communicartion
subject: Health protection measures
subject: Reactance
subject: Threat to freedom

description: The recent Covid-19 pandemic lead to a needed trust in politics and science like never before: Since the evaluation of governmental communication highly depends on trust in authorities like the government (Khosravi, 2020), media (Haslett, 2020), science (Siegrist &amp; Zingg, 2014) and accuracy and timeliness of actions (Vink et al., 2019), perceived governmental communication is a highly complex phenomenon that in the face of a global pandemic is especially important. As government communication strategies are in need of adequately balancing public health with individual rights (Vardavas et al., 2021), the public perception thereof is of crucial importance to ensure acceptance and adherence to those measures, in the best possible case diminishing fatality rates in the respective country (Oksanen et al., 2020). That determinants such as socioeconomic status, gender, or age are predicting protective health behavior (Bish &amp; Michie, 2010) already has been researched, similarly to cognitive components like people's risk perception (Conner &amp; Norman, 2015), and trust in politics and science (Dohle, Wingen &amp; Schreiber, 2020). The latter is especially important, since these measures usually include governmental restrictions (Siegrist &amp; Zingg, 2014) and therefore require confidence in institutions and the government: in the COVID-19 pandemic, countries with higher institutionalized trust report lower fatalities (Oksanen et al., 2020). Similarly, trusting science and experts who largely shape the public debate about medical necessities due to a global pandemic is essential for understanding such a complex situation (Hendriks, Kienhues, &amp; Bromme, 2016; Kupferschmidt, 2020). What happens if the health measures communicated by the government is perceived as threat, and generates reactance instead of trust? Seeing that not trusting authorities in the face of a global pandemic can actually have fatal outcomes (Oksanen et al., 2020), it has not been researched yet, which factors on the communication dimension lead to reactant behavior and an aversion to accept the health measures. Since these issues also contain ethically questionable factors such as asking about the perceived threat and fear of individuals, the ethical components of conducting sensible research will be followed carefully. A two wave panel study was conducted already to shed light on the emerging research gaps elaborated above.