How to survey citizens’ compliance with COVID-19 public health measures? Evidence from three survey experiments

Jean-François Daoust, Richard Nadeau, Ruth Dassonneville, Erick Lachapelle, Éric Bélanger, Justin Savoie and Clifton van der Linden
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Éric Bélanger: McGill University
Clifton van der Linden: McMaster University

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Abstract: 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.

Date: 2020-04-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:gursd

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/gursd

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