How Social Media Comments Inform the Promotion of Mask-Wearing and Other COVID-19 Prevention Strategies.

Current COVID-19 messaging efforts by public health departments are primarily informational in nature and assume that audiences will make rational choices in compliance, contradicting extensive research indicating that individuals make lifestyle choices based on emotional, social, and impulsive factors. To complement the current model, audience barriers to prevention need to be better understood. A content analysis of news source comments in response to daily COVID-19 reports was conducted in Montana, one of the states expressing resistance to routine prevention efforts.

Navigating the gender minefield: An IPV prevention campaign sheds light on the gender gap.

This article examines how differences in male and female views about intimate partner violence (IPV) contributed to divergent responses to a prevention campaign conducted in the western USA. The study examines focus groups (n = 22) and in-depth interview data (n = 13) collected during campaign development to shed light on quantitative results indicating that women (but not men) increased their perceived severity of domestic violence and awareness of services from pre-test to post-test, while male attitudes moved in the opposite direction. Results of the qualitative study provide the basis for the authors' conclusions about why reactions differed: (1) men's unwillingness to view abuse within a gender context limits men's ability to accept the inequity in statistically demonstrated male and female roles as perpetrators and victims; (2) male resentment of existing gender stereotypes contributed to a rejection of campaign messages that utilised gender prevalence statistics to depict images showing men as perpetrators and women as victims; and (3) victim blaming attitudes contributed to resistance to empathy for victims depicted in the campaign.