JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

As COVID-19 poses different levels of threat to people of different ages, health communication regarding prevention measures such as social distancing and isolation may be strengthened by understanding the unique experiences of different age groups.

Objective:

The aim was to examine how people of different ages (1) experienced the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) their respective rates and reasons for compliance or non-compliance with social distancing and isolation health guidance.

Methods:

We fielded a survey on social media (N = 17,287) early in the pandemic to examine the emotional impact of COVID-19 and individuals’ rates and reasons for non-compliance with public health guidance, using computational and content analytic methods of linguistic analysis. The majority of our participants (76.5%) were from the United States.

Results:

Younger (18-31), middle-aged (32-44, 45-64), and older individuals (65+) significantly varied in how they described the impact of COVID-19 on their lives, including their emotional experience, self-focused attention and topical concerns. Younger individuals were more emotionally negative, self-focused, and less concerned with family, while middle aged people were other-focused and concerned with family. The oldest and most at-risk group was most concerned with health-related terms but were also lower in anxiety and higher in the use of emotionally positive terms than the other, less at-risk age groups. We also found relatively high rates of non-compliance with COVID-19 prevention measures, such as social distancing and self-isolation, with younger people being more likely to be non-compliant than older people. Among the 43% of respondents who did not fully comply with health orders, people differed substantially in the reasons they gave for non-compliance. The most common reason for non-compliance was not being able to afford missing work (57.3%). While work obligations proved challenging for participants across ages, younger people struggled more to find adequate space to self-isolate and manage their mental and physical health; middle-aged people faced more concerns regarding childcare; and older people perceived themselves as able to take sufficient precautions.

Conclusions:

Analysis of natural language can provide insight into rapidly developing public health challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, uncovering individual differences in emotional experiences and health-related behaviors. In this case, our analyses revealed significant differences between different age groups in feelings about and responses to public health orders aimed to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. To improve public compliance with health orders as the pandemic continues, health communication strategies could be made more effective by being tailored to these age-related differences.