Trajectories of Compliance With COVID-19 Related Guidelines: Longitudinal Analyses of 50,000 UK Adults
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Abstract
Background
Governments have implemented a range of measures focused on changing citizens’ behaviors to lower the transmission of COVID-19. While international data shows that compliance did decline from the start of the pandemic, average trends could mask considerable heterogeneity in compliance behaviors.
Purpose
To explore trajectories of compliance with COVID-19 guidelines.
Methods
We used longitudinal data on self-reported compliance from 50,851 adults in the COVID-19 Social Study collected across two waves of the pandemic in the UK (April 01, 2020–February 22, 2021). We modeled typical compliance trajectories using latent class growth analysis (LCGA) and used multinomial logistic regression to examine whether individual personality and demographic characteristics were related to compliance trajectories.
Results
We selected a four-class LCGA solution. Most individuals maintained high levels of compliance and reported similar levels of compliance across the first and second waves. Approximately 15% of participants had decreasing levels of compliance across the pandemic, reporting noticeably lower levels of compliance in the second wave. Individuals with declining compliance levels were younger on average, in better physical health, had lower empathy and conscientiousness and greater general willingness to take risks.
Conclusions
While a minority, not all individuals have maintained high compliance across the pandemic. Decreasing compliance is related to several psychological traits. The results suggest that targeting of behavior change messages later in the pandemic may be needed to increase compliance.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.13.21255336: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:However, three caveats should be noted. First, we used data from a convenience sample of individuals willing to participate – and continue participating in – a study expressly about COVID-19. These individuals are likely to comply with COVID-19 guidelines more than the wider population, so the extent of non-compliance may be underestimated in this study. Second, we modelled compliance as changing continuously through time, but …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.13.21255336: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:However, three caveats should be noted. First, we used data from a convenience sample of individuals willing to participate – and continue participating in – a study expressly about COVID-19. These individuals are likely to comply with COVID-19 guidelines more than the wider population, so the extent of non-compliance may be underestimated in this study. Second, we modelled compliance as changing continuously through time, but individuals could violate guidelines intermittently to combat fatigue (for instance, occasionally meeting friends). Designs such as qualitative interviewing could be used to assess this possibility. Third, while our measure of compliance was framed in the present tense, it is possible that previous behaviour could influence responses, restricting temporal change. Nevertheless, our results are consistent with other research that has focused on specific behaviours (Petherick et al., 2021) There were other limitations of our study. We used self-report compliance data, which is likely to be subject to issues of social desirability and recall bias. Some of the associations observed in the multinomial logistic regression modelling may be explained by non-differential measurement error. Attrition from the study meant that extrapolations further into the pandemic were made for many participants. Though, as noted, we suspect this means our estimates of non-compliance are conservative. Finally, we were unable to provide a conclusive test of behavioural fatigue. I...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
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- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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