Outbreak! Socio-cognitive motivators of risk information sharing during the 2018 South Korean MERS-CoV epidemic

Abstract

This study examines socio-cognitive motivators of information-sharing behaviors during the 2018 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) outbreak in South Korea. During the outbreak, an online survey was fielded to 988 South Korean adult members of an online research panel. The survey included questions about MERS-CoV-related risk perceptions, and attitudes and beliefs about risk information behaviors during the outbreak. The concepts and relationships sought through those questions were informed by the risk information seeking and processing model and related works. Data analysis suggests that sharing risk information about MERS-CoV was heavily shaped by risk information seeking (such that more seeking led to more sharing) and somewhat shaped by perceived pressure from others to share risk information. Interestingly, perceived level of knowledge and perceived level of risk were not significantly related to sharing. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords:

• Information sharing
• risk information seeking and processing model (RISP)
• MERS-CoV

Disclosure statement

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

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A3A2074932).

Notes

1 Unfortunately, the rapid spreading of information during fearful situations, such as disasters, can contribute to the spread of inaccurate and false information (Kongthon et al. 2012).