As part of an international scientific team, RUDN University psychologists surveyed young people from Malaysia and Russia to determine the content and structure of social representations about COVID-19. The results were published in Social Sciences.

“Numerous previous studies have repeatedly noted that all of human history can be explained through the lens of disease: how they emerged, how they spread and disappeared, and how, on a case-by-case basis, societies tried to combat these threats and find ways to improve well-being and quality of life," says Inna Bovina, a professor in the Department of Clinical and Legal Psychology at Moscow State University of Psychology and Education. "Health and illness are the focus of one of the major European theoretical traditions in social psychology—social representation theory. Our goal was to identify and analyze social representations about COVID-19 in two different cultural contexts of Russia and Malaysia."

The study was conducted during the first wave of coronavirus when quarantine measures were introduced, but before mass vaccination from October to December 2020. A total of 195 young people from Malaysia and 154 from Russia were interviewed. The age of the respondents ranged from 17 to 36 years. Participants filled out an online questionnaire using the free association method and were asked to name five words or phrases that come to mind when thinking about COVID-19. Participants then rated their associations on a seven-point scale ranging from -3 (strongly negative) to +3 (strongly positive).

Based on the survey results, researchers identified the content and structure of social ideas about COVID-19. In both groups of students, ideas were concentrated around negative elements. Representatives of Malaysia identified more alarming key elements in the core of social representations: “death”, “pandemic”, “virus”, and “quarantine.” Among representatives of Russian youth, key elements (“quarantine” and “disease”) to a greater extent indicate rationalization and sometimes even denial of the threat. The authors partly explain this by the fact that official data on mortality due to COVID-19 in Russia appeared after the survey was conducted.

“Social imaginings can provide a framework for analyzing symbolic responses to a global medical and global emergency. Although the structure of social representations we constructed in two samples needs to be checked in other samples, these results make it possible to identify the features of symbolic strategies in two cultural contexts,” says Irina Novikova, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Pedagogy of the RUDN University.

Source: Scientific Project Lomonosov