TY - JOUR
AU - Daoust, Jean-François
AU - Nadeau, Richard
AU - Dassonneville, Ruth
AU - Lachapelle, Erick
AU - Bélanger, Éric
AU - Savoie, Justin
AU - van der Linden, Clifton
PY - 2021
DA - November
TI - How to survey citizens’ compliance with COVID-19 public health measures: Evidence from three survey experiments
JO - Journal of Experimental Political Science
EP - 317
VL - 8
IS - 3
DO - https://doi.org/10.1017/XPS.2020.25
AB - The extent to which citizens comply with newly-enacted public health measures such as social distancing or lockdowns strongly affects the propagation of the virus and the number of deaths from COVID-19. It is however very difficult to identify non-compliance through survey research because claiming to follow the rules is socially desirable. Using three survey experiments, we examine the efficacy of different “face-saving” questions that aim to reduce social desirability in the measurement of compliance with public health measures. Our treatments soften the social norm of compliance by way of a short preamble in combination with a guilty-free answer choice making it easier for respondents to admit non-compliance. We find that self-reported non-compliance increases by up to +11 percentage points when making use of a face-saving question. Considering the current context and the importance of measuring non-compliance, we argue that researchers around the world should adopt our most efficient face-saving question.
PB - Cambridge University Press
UR - https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/735aa681-274f-4508-bd73-1f2ab7dee2ca
KW - Coronavirus (COVID-19)
ER