Engaging Communities in Emerging Infectious Disease Mitigation to Improve Public Health and Safety

Engaging Communities in Emerging Infectious Disease Mitigation to Improve Public Health and Safety

Michàlle E. Mor Barak, Shinyi Wu, Gil Luria, Leslie P. Schnyder, Ruotong Liu, Anthony Nguyen, and Charles D. Kaplan

Journal paper

Emerging Infectious Diseases

2024

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for potent community-based tools to improve preparedness. We developed a community health-safety climate (HSC) measure to assess readiness to adopt health behaviors during a pandemic. We conducted a mixed-methods study incorporating qualitative methods (e.g., focus groups) to generate items for the measure and quantitative data from a February 2021 national survey to test reliability, multilevel construct, and predictive and nomologic validities. The 20-item HSC measure is unidimensional (Cronbach α = 0.87). All communities had strong health-safety climates but with significant differences between communities (F = 10.65; p<0.001), and HSC levels predicted readiness to adopt health-safety behaviors. HSC strength moderated relationships between HSC level and behavioral indicators; higher climate homogeneity demonstrated stronger correlations. The HSC measure can predict community readiness to adopt health-safety behaviors in communities to inform interventions before diseases spread, providing a valuable tool for public health authorities and policymakers during a pandemic.