Perceived social support and compliance with stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 outbreak: evidence from Iran
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Perceived social support and compliance with stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 outbreak: evidence from Iran Toktam Paykani1, Gregory D. Zimet2, Reza Esmaeili1, Amir Reza Khajedaluee3 and Mohammad Khajedaluee4*
Abstract Background: Strong evidence demonstrates that social support plays a key role in facilitating preventive health behaviors. The aim of the current study was to assess the effects of perceived social support on compliance with stay-at-home orders in response to a COVID-19 outbreak during the Persian New Year (Nowruz) holydays, since Nowruz holidays of 2020 coincided with the peak of the coronavirus epidemic in Iran. Methods: This cross-sectional survey was carried out based on phone interviews of 1073 adults aged over 18 years from 4 to 12 April 2020 in Mashhad, Khorasan-Razavi Province, as the second largest city of Iran. A systematic random sampling was carried out using fixed phone number lists provided by Telecommunication Company of Khorasan-Razavi Province. Phone interviews were carried out by trained interviewers from the Iranian Students Polling Agency (ISPA) at various times of the day. The survey included sociodemographic questions, perceived social support scale (MSPSS) and questions about self-isolation during the Nowruz holiday. Statistical analysis included Chi-square test, Mann-Whitney test and multivariate logistic regression. Results: 20.5% of participants reported poor compliance with stay at home orders during the first 2 weeks of Nowruz. Clear social gradients were not found in stay-at-home compliance. When controlling socio-demographic factors, perceived social support, interestingly, both fostered and hindered people’s compliance with stay at home orders, depending on the source of support from family members (OR = .874, 95% CI = .803, .950, p < .005), friends (OR = 1.147, 95% CI = 1.076, 1.222, p < .001) and a significant other person (OR = .926, 95% CI = .849, 1.010, p = .084). Conclusions: Public health messaging may need to emphasize the role that friends and families can play in helping to protect those in their friendship/family groups by promoting compliance with social distancing. Further in-depth studies are recommended to evaluate how this kind of messaging can most effectively encourage people to engage in social distancing practices. Keywords: Social support, Social distancing, Self-isolation, COVID-19
* Correspondence: [email protected] 4 Department of Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Iran Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party ma
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