The language of crisis: spatiotemporal effects of COVID-19 pandemic dynamics on health crisis communications by political leaders.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Mandl BJ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8748550 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:This article maps political rhetoric by national leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify and characterize global variations in major rhetorical storylines invoked in publicly available speeches (N = 1201) across a sample of 26 countries. Employing a text analytics or corpus linguistics approach, we show that state heads rhetorically lead their nations by: enforcing systemic interventions, upholding global unity, encouraging communal cooperation, stoking national fervor, and assuring responsive governance. Principal component analysis further shows that country-level rhetoric is organized along emergent dimensions of cultural cognition: an agency-structure axis to define the loci of pandemic interventions and a hierarchy-egalitarianism axis which distinguishes top-down enforcement from bottom-up calls for cooperation. Furthermore, we detect a striking contrast between countries featuring populist versus cosmopolitan rhetoric, which diverged in terms of their collective meaning making around leading over versus leading with, as well as their experienced pandemic severity. We conclude with implications for understanding global pandemic leadership in an unequal world and the contributions of mixed-methods approaches to a generative political psychology in times of crisis.
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Project description:Abstract Measures to cope with the COVID‐19 pandemic have put a sudden halt to street protests and other forms of citizen involvement in Europe. At the same time, the pandemic has increased the need for solidarity, motivating citizens to become involved on behalf of people at risk and the vulnerable more generally. This research note empirically examines the tension between the demobilisation and activation potential of the COVID‐19 crisis. Drawing on original survey data from seven Western European countries, we examine the extent, forms, and drivers of citizens’ engagement. Our findings show the remarkable persistence of pre‐existing political and civic engagement patterns. Concurrently, we show that threat perceptions triggered by the multifaceted COVID‐19 crisis have mobilized Europeans in the early phase of the pandemic. Similarly, the role of extreme ideological orientations in explaining (regular) political engagement indicates that the current situation may create its specific mobilisation potentials.
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Project description:AimThe aim of this study is to describe nurse perceptions of nurse leaders' internal crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic.BackgroundInternal communication is a vital part of nurse leaders' work, even more so during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodThis is a cross-sectional study design. The data were collected from 204 Finnish nurses in February 2021. A questionnaire developed in this study consisted of 29 items measuring internal crisis communication and seven demographic variables. The relationships between the variables were examined with cross-tabulation, a chi-squared test and non-parametric tests. Factor structure was evaluated with exploratory factor analysis and reliability with Cronbach's alpha.ResultsNurses perceived the timeliness of communication highest and interaction the lowest. Nurses from intensive care, acute care and operative rooms gave highest evaluations for the content of communication and timeliness. Nurses working with COVID-19 patients daily or weekly evaluated the highest level of false communication.ConclusionNurse leaders' internal crisis communication was timely, especially in the most critical units dealing with the pandemic. The study highlighted the importance of considering a unit's special needs for internal crisis communication. Interaction between nurse leaders and nursing staff during periods of crisis needs improvement.Implications for nursing managementNurse leaders' successful and emphatic communication is important in supporting nurses in managing a crisis.
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Project description:In two large-scale longitudinal datasets (combined N = 5761), we investigated ability-related political polarization in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We observed more polarization with greater ability in emotional responses, risk perceptions, and product-purchase intentions across five waves of data collection with a diverse, convenience sample from February 2020 through July 2020 (Study 1, N = 1267). Specifically, more liberal participants had more negative emotional responses and greater risk perceptions of COVID-19 than conservative participants. Compared to conservatives, liberal participants also interpreted quantitative information as indicating higher COVID-19 risk and sought COVID-related news more from liberal than conservative news media. Of key importance, we also compared verbal and numeric cognitive abilities for their independent capacity to predict greater polarization. Although measures of numeric ability, such as objective numeracy, are often used to index ability-related polarization, ideological differences were more pronounced among those higher in verbal ability specifically. Similar results emerged in secondary analysis of risk perceptions in a nationally representative longitudinal dataset (Study 2, N = 4494; emotions and purchase intentions were not included in this dataset). We further confirmed verbal-ability-related polarization findings on non-COVID policy attitudes (i.e., weapons bans and Medicare-for-all) measured cross-sectionally. The present Study 2 documented ability-related polarization emerging over time for the first time (rather than simply measuring polarization in existing beliefs). Both studies demonstrated verbal ability measures as the most robust predictors of ability-related polarization. Together, these results suggest that polarization may be a function of the amount and/or application of verbal knowledge rather than selective application of quantitative reasoning skills.
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