Social Behavior and COVID-19: Analysis of the Social Factors behind Compliance with Interventions across the United States

Morteza Maleki (), Mohsen Bahrami, Monica Menendez and Jose Balsa-Barreiro
Additional contact information
Morteza Maleki: School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA
Mohsen Bahrami: Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Monica Menendez: Division of Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island P.O. Box 129188, United Arab Emirates
Jose Balsa-Barreiro: Division of Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island P.O. Box 129188, United Arab Emirates

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 23, 1-26

Abstract: Since its emergence, COVID-19 has caused a great impact in health and social terms. Governments and health authorities have attempted to minimize this impact by enforcing different mandates. Recent studies have addressed the relationship between various socioeconomic variables and compliance level to these interventions. However, little attention has been paid to what constitutes people’s response and whether people behave differently when faced with different interventions. Data collected from different sources show very significant regional differences across the United States. In this paper, we attempt to shed light on the fact that a response may be different depending on the health system capacity and each individuals’ social status. For that, we analyze the correlation between different societal (i.e., education, income levels, population density, etc.) and healthcare capacity-related variables (i.e., hospital occupancy rates, percentage of essential workers, etc.) in relation to people’s level of compliance with three main governmental mandates in the United States: mobility restrictions, mask adoption, and vaccine participation. Our aim was to isolate the most influential variables impacting behavior in response to these policies. We found that there was a significant relationship between individuals’ educational levels and political preferences with respect to compliance with each of these mandates.

Keywords: behavioral analysis; COVID-19; governmental intervention; mask adoption; movement change; vaccine participation; non-pharmaceutical interventions; policy recommendations; social context; social behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/23/15716/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/23/15716/ (text/html)

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:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:23:p:15716-:d:984726

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().