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Social Media Users' Engagement with Fear Appeal Elements in Government's Health Crisis Communication via State-Owned Media.

Authors :
Yao, Le
Ngai, Cindy Sing Bik
Singh, Rita Gill
Chen, Fangfang
Source :
Journal of Health Communication; 2024, Vol. 29 Issue 8, p524-537, 14p
Publication Year :
2024

Abstract

Government health messaging is significant to the containment of public health crises. Such communication may benefit from using fear appeal, a message strategy for promoting health and preventing diseases. Yet little scholarly attention has been paid to how fear appeal is employed in government messaging to promote social media engagement through online actions including likes, shares, and comments. These actions play a meaningful role in addressing communication exigencies within the context of health crises. In this study, quantitative content analysis and corpus linguistics methods were employed to analyze fear appeal-related elements in COVID-19 messages sent by a state-owned media outlet on social media. The results show that when compared to messages without threat, messages conveying threat elicited significantly more comments, in which emotions and perceptions to threat and efficacy were exhibited, while messages containing both threat and efficacy generated more engagement in comparison to messages with threat alone. Moreover, while subdimensions under efficacy were positive predictors of engagement, those under threat were primarily found to have exerted negative effects. The findings provide insights into how fear appeal elements can be employed in government health crisis communication to engage the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
10810730
Volume :
29
Issue :
8
Database :
Complementary Index
Journal :
Journal of Health Communication
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
179023083
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2024.2378338