Mask on while Asian: how media use, hostile media perceptions, and alienation influence U.S.-Dwelling Chinese’s protective behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

As the coronavirus spreads across the globe, xenophobia and racism against Chinese and Asians at large are also surging. In a two-wave survey, we focused on U.S.-dwelling Chinese (N = 1,256), a minority group that was targeted by racial discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigated the relationships among a number of media and perceptual factors related to this group at Wave 1 and how these factors predicted the adoption of a wide range of protective behaviors (i.e., disease prevention, safety enhancement, donation, and going back to China) at Wave 2. Overall, our proposed model depicting the relationships among host country and country of origin media use, hostile media perceptions and alienation was largely supported by the data. Our results also showed how these factors predicted actual behaviors. The findings provide important contributions to both theory and practice in multiple ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Alienation
• Chinese
• COVID-19
• health
• media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Data available on request from the authors.

Notes

¹ To be clear, the original wording in our survey was ‘美国的媒体’, which means media located in the U.S. or owned by American companies, and ‘中国的媒体’, which means media located in China or owned by Chinese companies, not Chinese-language media.

² We decided to use four disease-prevention behaviors as separate outcome variables because some of them did not correlate highly with others (r ranged from .23 to .60). A composite score of four behaviors did not achieve satisfactory reliability, either (α = .39).

³ The face mask question was worded as ‘In the past week, how often did you wear face masks when going outside?’ The response options ranged from 1 = not at all to 5 = all the time, and included an additional option: 6 = did not go outside in the past week. We considered those selecting the ‘did not go outside’ option as an extreme case of wearing face masks because they covered their face from others completely by staying inside. Thus, we treated the face mask variable as a continuous variable ranging from 1 to 6 in our analyses.

⁴ We measured going back to China using items asking participants whether they had searched for or bought flight tickets to go back to China. Four hundred and twenty-two participants reported having done either (32.9%). Searching or buying behaviors were combined into a dummy-coded variable (0 ‘no’ to 1 ‘yes’) for subsequent analyses because only 79 participants (6.2%) bought flight tickets for China and 343 searched for ticket information but did not buy ticket (26.7%). The small volume of ticket purchase may be caused by the limited flights between the U.S. and China at that moment.