The Pandemic and its Publics – How people receive, interpret and act upon official guidance

Social scientists from the School of Media and Communication produce a report on how people respond to official coronavirus guidance.

Stephen Coleman, Giles Moss and Nely Konstantinova produced the report that states people can be split into six distinct groups determined by the ways they search for, make sense of and act upon official advice.

This report forms part of the Communicating the Pandemic project:

Good communication with all sections of the population is essential to managing the COVID-19 pandemic effectively. Our study aims to develop evidence-based recommendations to improve the communication of the pandemic by exploring how different groups receive, understand and act upon official information about COVID-19.

Through a combination of methods, our study will provide the strongest possible evidence-based advice regarding the communication of the pandemic and the intelligibility and effectiveness of messages for different groups… <and> we will deliver feasible recommendations to the appropriate bodies on how to improve public communication related to COVID-19.

Download the report (PDF: 1.94MB)