Facilitators and barriers to compliance with COVID-19 guidelines: a structural topic modelling analysis of free-text data from 17,500 UK adults
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Abstract
Background
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government implemented a series of guidelines, rules, and restrictions to change citizens’ behaviour to tackle the spread of the virus, such as the promotion of face masks and the imposition of lockdown stay-at-home orders. The success of such measures requires active co-operation on the part of citizens, but compliance was not complete. Detailed research is required on the factors that aided or hindered compliance with these measures.
Methods
To understand the facilitators and barriers to compliance with COVID-19 guidelines, we used structural topic modelling, a text mining technique, to extract themes from over 26,000 free-text survey responses from 17,500 UK adults, collected between 17 November and 23 December 2020.
Results
The main factors facilitating compliance were desires to reduce risk to oneself and one’s family and friends and to, a lesser extent, the general public. Also of importance were a desire to return to normality, the availability of activities and technological means to contact family and friends, and the ability to work from home. Identified barriers were difficulties maintaining social distancing in public (due to the actions of other people or environmental constraints), the need to provide or receive support from family and friends, social isolation, missing loved ones, and mental health impacts, perceiving the risks as low, social pressure to not comply, and difficulties understanding and keep abreast of changing rules. Several of the barriers and facilitators raised were related to participant characteristics. Notably, women were more likely to discuss needing to provide or receive mental health support from friends and family.
Conclusion
The results demonstrated an array of factors contributed to compliance with guidelines. Of particular policy importance, the results suggest that government communication that emphasizes the potential risks of the virus and provides simple, consistent guidance on how to reduce the spread of the virus would improve compliance with preventive behaviours as COVID-19 continues and for future pandemics.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.28.21259621: (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:Nevertheless, this study had several limitations. Not all of the topics identified a single theme consistently. Associations with participant characteristics could be driven or biased by idiosyncratic texts. We used a convenience sample that, though heterogeneous, was unrepresentative of the UK population and, further, respondents to the free-text question were biased towards the highly educated. Response biases could also have …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.28.21259621: (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:Nevertheless, this study had several limitations. Not all of the topics identified a single theme consistently. Associations with participant characteristics could be driven or biased by idiosyncratic texts. We used a convenience sample that, though heterogeneous, was unrepresentative of the UK population and, further, respondents to the free-text question were biased towards the highly educated. Response biases could also have generated bias in the topic regression results. As we focused on topics offered spontaneously by respondents, a participant not writing about a particular topic does not necessarily imply that the participant does not agree with its sentiment, though our assumptions is that the proportion of text devoted to a topic is related to its perceived importance. Finally, while we included a wide set of predictors in our structural topic models, many relevant factors were unobserved. Associations may be biased by unobserved confounding.
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.
- No funding statement was detected.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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