Studying public perception to address COVID-19 infodemic
Prof. Renate Schubert and collaborators from the University of Zurich and University of Hong Kong are studying public perception to improve COVID-19-related communication in the Asian context.
In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, citizens around the world have been exposed to crisis communication from a diverse spectrum of media outlets, including websites of public health authorities and universities, newspapers, television broadcasts, and social media platforms. These have become both sources of information and incubators for emotional responses, moral judgements, and behavioral changes in daily routines, during a public health emergency.
Providing high-quality information while actively dispelling misinformation or dismantling myths is, hence, a key concern for national and global health authorities. This requires an excellent grasp of public perception in order to allow for continuous adaptations and improvement of emergency communication strategies.
As such, PubliCo - an experimental online platform for COVID-19 related public perception was developed in Switzerland to tackle the “infodemic”, with a focus on a nuanced and in-depth understanding of public perception and a strong citizen-science component.
Prof. Renate Schubert, principal investigator of Measuring, Modelling and Enhancing Social Resilience at Future Resilient Systems, is collaborating with researchers from the University of Hong Kong and University of Zurich in a new project starting in January 2021. The project explores the feasibility and desirability of translating the PubliCo approach to selected Asian contexts, specifically Hong Kong and Singapore.
At the same time, the project "Is the Swiss PubliCo platform for the study of COVID-19-related public perception transferable to Asian contexts?" initiates a critical-reflective, interdisciplinary examination of what “good” COVID-19 risk communication and public crisis management constitutes and how much this concept is subject to variation due to social, cultural, economic or legal factors.
In this multidisciplinary research spanning the topics from public perception of the health crisis to risk communication, ethics and law, Prof. Schubert contributes her expertise in economics – a key perspective to understanding the impact of COVID-19 and COVID-related measures on public perception. She will also share insights from her comparative study on social resilience and COVID-19 in Switzerland and Singapore, and integrate Singapore in the feasibility study.
Funded by ETH Zurich and the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), the project is led by the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine in the University of Zurich and the Centre for Medical Ethics and Law at the Li Ka Shing School of Medicine and Faculty of Law in the University of Hong Kong.
This project will contribute to the sustainable development and transferability of the PubliCo online platform to other regional contexts, which may result in improved and tailored crisis communication and management of COVID-19 across different countries. This supports the further development and deployment of PubliCo in Switzerland and Asia, but also as a transferable tool for public health crisis management more generally.