Vulnerability to rumours during the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore
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Abstract
Introduction: Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many rumours have emerged. Given prior research linking rumour exposure to mental well-being, we conducted a nationwide survey to document the base rate of rumour exposure and factors associated with rumour vulnerability. Methods: Between March and July 2020, 1,237 participants were surveyed on 5 widely disseminated COVID-19 rumours (drinking water frequently could be preventive, eating garlic could be preventive, the outbreak arose because of bat soup consumption, the virus was created in an American lab, and the virus was created in a Chinese lab). For each rumour, participants reported whether they had heard, shared or believed each rumour. Results: Although most participants had been exposed to COVID-19 rumours, few shared or believed these. Sharing behaviours sometimes occurred in the absence of belief; however, education emerged as a protective factor for both sharing and belief. Conclusion: Our results suggest that campaigns targeting skills associated with higher education (e.g. epistemology) may prove more effective than counter-rumour messages.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.01.20205187: (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: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:4.1 Limitations: In describing these findings, we highlight several limitations of our research methods. First, we relied on participants’ self-reports regarding rumor exposure and behaviors. Although this strategy provided individual-level information (e.g., beliefs, demographics) not available in studies of actual rumor posts (e.g., …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.01.20205187: (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: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:4.1 Limitations: In describing these findings, we highlight several limitations of our research methods. First, we relied on participants’ self-reports regarding rumor exposure and behaviors. Although this strategy provided individual-level information (e.g., beliefs, demographics) not available in studies of actual rumor posts (e.g., when Twitter posts are mined), the survey method is vulnerable to recollection and reporting biases. Moving forward, future studies may opt to integrate digital documentation of rumor posts alongside self-reported measures. As a second limitation, we only sampled rumors that were not time-sensitive. Given the limitations of the survey methodology, we could not track rumors that arose from fast-changing events on the ground – for example, rumors about the first COVID-19-related death in Singapore, or rumors about the availability of face masks (Asokan, 2020; Ministry of Communications and Information, 2020). It thus remains to be seen whether our findings can generalize to these forms of rumors. 4.2 Strengths: These study limitations need to be viewed alongside the putative strengths of our research methodology. To the best of our knowledge, our study represents the first attempt to identify individual vulnerabilities in the spread of COVID-19 rumors. The research involved a large sample size (1237 participants), captured pandemic-related dynamics over a long duration (5 months), and examined specific rumors that had been widely disseminated. 4.3...
Results from TrialIdentifier: We found the following clinical trial numbers in your paper:
Identifier Status Title NCT04305574 Completed Social Media Use During COVID-19 Results from Barzooka: We found bar graphs of continuous data. We recommend replacing bar graphs with more informative graphics, as many different datasets can lead to the same bar graph. The actual data may suggest different conclusions from the summary statistics. For more information, please see Weissgerber et al (2015).
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.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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