Could attitudes toward COVID-19 in Spain render men more vulnerable than women?

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic affects the whole world. Spain is 5th in the world and 3rd in Europe with the largest number of diagnosed cases. Spanish citizens’ attitudes are important in controlling the pandemic. This research assessed attitudes of Spaniards toward COVID-19 in two studies. One (n = 64) was conducted in a shopping centre in Madrid and another (n = 640) online. The results of both studies suggest that women in Spain have a ‘more responsible’ attitude toward the COVID-19 than men. Young adults (18–25 years) scored lower on compliance with safety measures and perceived need to stay home than older adults. In Study 1, level of compliance, knowing someone at risk, and knowing someone infected predicted 31.2% of the variance in the perceived need to stay home. In Study 2, personal concern, level of compliance, keeping distance from others, and perceived social alarm predicted 28.5% of the variance in perceived need to stay home. Regardless of age and/or gender, Spanish people's personal concern about COVID-19 was less than their perceived social alarm about it. These results might help policy makers in considering public attitudes which could play an important role in controlling the current, and possibly a second, wave of COVID-19.

KEYWORDS:

• Adults
• Coronavirus
• Epidemic
• Morbidity
• Virus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical clearance

Ethical permission for the study was obtained from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.

Author contributions

RV designed and coordinated the research and collected the data; RRB helped in the design, data-collection, data-recording, and data-verification; SB participated in writing, literature search, and formatted the manuscript for publication; AS performed the statistical analyses and wrote the Methods, Discussion and Conclusion sections of the report.

Notes

1 The degree of freedom is lower because those who were ‘unsure’ were not included in this analysis.

2 Due the the large difference in the size of the two groups, we also performed Mann–Whitney U tests, which yielded identical results.