Within-family influences on compliance with social-distancing measures during COVID-19 lockdowns in the United Kingdom

Ozan Aksoy ()
Additional contact information
Ozan Aksoy: University College London

Nature Human Behaviour, 2022, vol. 6, issue 12, 1660-1668

Abstract: Abstract The compliance of adolescents, who are often unfairly portrayed as spreaders of COVID-19, with public health measures is essential for containing diseases. But does adolescents’ compliance develop independently from their parents? Using nationally representative longitudinal data and cross-lagged structural equation panel models, here I study compliance with social-distancing measures of 6,752 triplets that comprise the adolescent child (age 19), their mother and their father during two national lockdowns in the United Kingdom. The results show that adolescents have the lowest and their mothers have the highest levels of compliance, and compliance generally drops over time. Moreover, mothers, whether the child lives at home or not, and fathers, when the child lives at home, have significant influence on their adolescent child’s compliance. The child also influences their fathers’ compliance. The parental influence on adolescents’ compliance documented here suggests that family dynamics play a role in compliance with social-distancing guidelines, which may be useful for informing future health policy.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01465-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:6:y:2022:i:12:d:10.1038_s41562-022-01465-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01465-w

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().