Determinants of Support for COVID-19 Lockdown Measures–Model Inventory

Abstract

The Determinants of Support for COVID-19 Lockdown Measures—Model Inventory (Wang, 2022) is an empirical psychometric instrument designed to evaluate the multi-factorial determinants governing civic endorsement of mandatory societal confinement, quarantine protocols, and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during public health emergencies. Developed against the backdrop of the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in mainland China, the inventory synthesizes three prominent conceptual paradigms: the Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, 1974), the Reasoned Action Approach (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010), and cultural worldview frameworks regarding communitarianism versus individualism (Triandis & Gelfand, 1998). The inventory comprises 24 items operationalized across seven latent constructs: Communitarian Worldviews, Perceived Susceptibility, Perceived Severity, Experiential Attitudes, Instrumental Attitudes, Subjective Norms, and Policy Support. Responses are recorded on a 7-point Likert scale spanning from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree).

Psychometric evaluation was performed on a sample of Chinese adults (N = 528; mean age = 29.7 years). Robust Maximum Likelihood confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) within LISREL demonstrated an exceptional fit to the empirical data: Satorra-Bentler scaled χ² (209, N = 528) = 318.8, p < .001; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = .032 (90% CI [.024, .038]); Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = .99; and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) = .045. Standardized factor loadings ranged from .62 to .74. Construct reliability (CR) coefficients spanned from .73 to .94, and Cronbach’s alpha coefficients demonstrated internal consistency ranging from .65 to .93 across subscales. Two dimensions demonstrated average variance extracted (AVE) values of .47 and .48, which remain methodologically acceptable given their elevated composite reliability indices exceeding .70. This instrument equips public health authorities, health psychologists, and policy analysts with a validated measurement model to diagnose cognitive, normative, and cultural drivers of public compliance during large-scale biosecurity crises.

Keywords

Communitarian Worldviews, Experiential Attitudes, Instrumental Attitudes, Perceived Severity, Perceived Susceptibility, Policy Support, Subjective Norms, Health Belief Model, Reasoned Action Approach, COVID-19 Lockdown, Risk Perception, Public Health Compliance

Authors

The scale was developed and psychometrically validated by Xiao Wang, Ph.D., affiliated with the School of Communication at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, United States.

• Author ORCID Identifier: 0000-0002-0326-4832
• Institutional Affiliation: School of Communication, Rochester Institute of Technology, 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623, United States
• Primary Contact Email: [email protected]

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Determinants of Support for COVID-19 Lockdown Measures—Model Inventory is to systematically identify, quantify, and explain the sociopsychological and ideological antecedents that lead citizens to endorse or resist severe, state-mandated non-pharmaceutical interventions during pandemics. Mitigating the transmission of highly contagious respiratory pathogens often requires states to implement unprecedented restrictions on civil movement, commercial trade, social assembly, and personal autonomy. While epidemiological modeling routinely projects the biological efficacy of citywide cordons sanitaires and household lockdowns, the actual success of such mandates depends strictly on voluntary public compliance and perceived governmental legitimacy.

Widespread resistance, non-compliance, or psychological reactance undermines epidemic suppression, accelerating viral dissemination and straining healthcare infrastructures. Conversely, unquestioning compliance without public insight obfuscates underlying psychological strains, including isolation distress, economic anxiety, and social alienation. The theoretical rationale of this measurement model addresses an essential empirical gap: health-protective behaviors during a national catastrophe cannot be understood solely through individualist threat perceptions (such as fear of infection) or top-down legal coercion. Instead, public endorsement is an outcome of an interrelated cognitive-affective nexus comprising ideological worldviews, perceived pathogen risks, instrumental calculations of utility, emotional projections, and social normative expectations.

In applied research and governance contexts, this inventory serves several critical functions:

• Epidemiological Policy Formulation: It provides municipal and national health ministries with diagnostic baseline data regarding community willingness to tolerate invasive movement restrictions, quarantine orders, and geographic checkpoints.
• Targeted Risk Communication: By distinguishing between experiential (affective) and instrumental (functional) attitudes, communication strategists can calibrate public health messaging to alleviate psychological dread while reinforcing the tangible utility of lockdown interventions.
• Cross-Cultural Comparative Sociology: The integration of communitarian worldview metrics allows behavioral scientists to investigate how collective cultural orientations moderate threat assessment and collective civic sacrifice in Western versus East Asian cultural settings.
• Longitudinal Pandemic Surveillance: Tracking these constructs over extended outbreaks enables public health officials to identify “compliance fatigue,” erosion of institutional trust, and shifts in peer subjective norms as lockdowns extend over time.

Psychological Construct

The Determinants of Support for COVID-19 Lockdown Measures—Model Inventory conceptualizes policy endorsement not as a unitary political stance, but as a multi-determined psychological state driven by seven distinct latent constructs. Each construct represents an established psychological or sociological domain adapted to assess public crisis response:

1. Communitarian Worldviews

Rooted in cultural cognition and collectivism theories, this construct assesses the degree to which an individual prioritizes societal solidarity, social cohesion, and the collective welfare over personal liberties, market autonomy, and unfettered self-determination. In the context of pandemic containment, individuals with elevated communitarian worldviews view personal restrictions (e.g., stay-at-home orders, business closures) as legitimate contributions to the public good rather than infringements on individual rights.

2. Perceived Susceptibility

Drawn from the Health Belief Model, perceived susceptibility operationalizes an individual’s subjective assessment of their personal vulnerability to contracting SARS-CoV-2. This construct measures the perceived likelihood of viral transmission within one’s immediate geographic, professional, and domestic environments. High perceived susceptibility functions as an internal cue to action, predisposing individuals to view structural societal quarantines as personally protective barriers.

3. Perceived Severity

Perceived severity captures beliefs concerning the seriousness, clinical lethality, and socio-economic consequences of contracting the virus, as well as the broader societal peril posed by an unmitigated outbreak. It encompasses fears of medical complications, long-term disability, mortality, and the secondary collapse of regional hospital systems. When both susceptibility and severity are elevated, individuals experience heightened health-threat appraisals that promote support for aggressive mitigation policies.

4. Experiential Attitudes

Reflecting the dual-process attitude theories formalized in the Reasoned Action Approach, experiential attitudes capture the direct affective, visceral, and emotional reactions associated with living under a comprehensive societal lockdown. It evaluates whether an individual experiences or anticipates the lockdown as emotionally comforting, reassuring, and mentally stabilizing versus stressful, suffocating, unpleasant, and psychologically draining. Affective revulsion toward confinement can depress policy endorsement even when the logical utility of the lockdown is acknowledged.

5. Instrumental Attitudes

Instrumental attitudes evaluate the utilitarian, pragmatic, and cognitive assessments of the lockdown measure. Respondents assess whether implementing a sweeping societal lockdown is an effective, necessary, advantageous, and rational mechanism to interrupt transmission chains, preserve regional healthcare capacity, and restore societal safety. This represents an intellectual appraisal of policy efficacy irrespective of immediate personal emotional discomfort.

6. Subjective Norms

Subjective norms reflect the perceived social pressures exerted by influential reference groups—such as family members, close friends, community elders, coworkers, and neighborhood associations. This dimension evaluates the extent to which an individual believes that key stakeholders expect them to support, respect, and obey governmental lockdown mandates, as well as their motivation to conform to these perceived communal expectations.

7. Policy Support

The terminal dependent construct measures direct endorsement, civic affirmation, and explicit backing of state-enforced lockdown policies. It captures behavioral willingness to vote for, verbally defend, sustain, and strictly adhere to legal directives mandating residential isolation, commercial shutdowns, public transport suspensions, and travel bans during an active epidemic wave.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the inventory rests upon the theoretical convergence of three seminal frameworks in health psychology, behavioral sociology, and cultural cognition:

1. The Health Belief Model (HBM)

Formulated by Irwin M. Rosenstock (1974) and expanded by Becker (1974), the HBM posits that personal health-related actions are governed by two principal cognitive evaluations: threat appraisal (consisting of perceived personal susceptibility and perceived disease severity) and outcome expectations (perceived benefits versus barriers of action). Wang (2022) adapted this model by demonstrating that threat perceptions do not merely guide discrete personal protective practices (e.g., hand sanitization, mask-wearing), but serve as macro-level cognitive justifications for consenting to severe state restrictions. Citizens who recognize severe epidemiological threats accept the loss of personal conveniences in exchange for biological defense.

2. The Reasoned Action Approach (RAA)

The Reasoned Action Approach, formulated by Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen (2010), provides the behavioral decision-making infrastructure of the inventory. The RAA asserts that behavioral intentions and policy commitments are directly shaped by attitudes toward the behavior, subjective normative pressures, and perceived behavioral control. Crucially, the inventory incorporates Fishbein and Ajzen’s nuanced distinction between instrumental attitudes (cognitive evaluations of utility, logic, and effectiveness) and experiential attitudes (hedonic, emotional, and sensory reactions). This division allows researchers to examine scenarios where an individual intellectually endorses a policy’s clinical utility while experiencing acute affective aversion to confinement.

3. Cultural Cognition and Communitarianism Theory

Individual cognitive appraisals do not occur in an ideological vacuum. Incorporating the horizontal and vertical individualism-collectivism frameworks of Harry Triandis and Michele Gelfand (1998), alongside cultural cognition frameworks (Kahan et al., 2011), the model positions communitarian worldviews as an exogenous orienting framework. Communitarianism posits that societal survival relies on mutual obligation, shared sacrifice, and social reciprocity. In communitarian cultural environments, social obligations take precedence over individual entitlements, lowering cognitive resistance to collective containment mandates.

Validity

Empirical assessment of the inventory confirms robust psychometric validity across multiple domains, based on data collected from Chinese participants during the acute phase of pandemic mitigation.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was established through full-information maximum likelihood structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis. Convergent validity—the extent to which scale items accurately reflect their hypothesized latent constructs—was supported by standardized factor loadings across all 24 items, which ranged from .62 to .74. Every item loading was statistically significant at p < .001, demonstrating that the observable indicators explain a substantial portion of variance in their targeted latent dimensions.

Regarding Average Variance Extracted (AVE), methodological standards established by Fornell and Larcker (1981) generally recommend an AVE threshold of ≥ .50. In this measurement model, five constructs exceeded this threshold, while two constructs yielded AVE values of .47 and .48. According to psychometric criteria established by Fornell and Larcker (1981) and later reinforced by Hair et al. (2019), if an individual construct’s AVE is slightly below .50 but its composite/construct reliability exceeds .70, the convergent validity of that construct remains psychometrically acceptable. Because construct reliabilities for these two dimensions were .77 and .73 (comfortably exceeding the recommended .70 cutoff), adequate convergent validity was confirmed.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established through inter-construct correlation matrix inspection and comparison against average variance metrics. The square root of the AVE for each latent variable exceeded its bivariate correlations with any other latent variable in the model, demonstrating that each subscale measures an empirically separable psychological phenomenon. For instance, while experiential attitudes and instrumental attitudes shared positive covariance, their distinct factor loadings and divergence across respondents demonstrated that affective emotional reactions are empirically separable from pragmatic assessments of policy utility.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity was demonstrated through structural path analysis. As theoretically hypothesized, communitarian worldviews significantly predicted both instrumental attitudes and subjective norms. Threat perceptions (susceptibility and severity) significantly elevated instrumental policy evaluations. In turn, instrumental attitudes, experiential attitudes, and subjective norms accounted for substantial unique variance in the terminal endogenous construct, Policy Support. This confirms that the inventory behaves consistently with underlying health behavior and social psychological theories.

Reliability

The scale demonstrates solid internal consistency across its seven latent subscales, evaluated through both classical test theory (Cronbach’s alpha) and modern structural equation modeling indices (Construct / Composite Reliability, CR).

Overall, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients across the seven latent dimensions ranged from .65 to .93, reflecting acceptable to excellent homogeneity among items within each subscale. Composite reliability coefficients ranged from .73 to .94, confirming that the measurement error variance across latent indicators is low and well within psychometric standards.

Factor Analysis

The factorial validity of the 24-item inventory was assessed using structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) executed via LISREL software. Due to multivariate non-normality common in public health crisis response data, the model was estimated using the Robust Maximum Likelihood (RML) technique alongside the Satorra-Bentler scaled chi-square test statistic.

Model Fit Parameters

The measurement model specification yielded fit indices that satisfy contemporary psychometric criteria (Hu & Bentler, 1999):

• Satorra-Bentler Scaled Chi-Square: χ² (df = 209, N = 528) = 318.8, p < .001. While the chi-square statistic is statistically significant, this sensitivity is expected given the large sample size (N = 528). The relative ratio of χ²/df is 1.52, falling well below the conservative threshold of 2.0 or 3.0, indicating acceptable fit.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .032 (with a 90% Confidence Interval of [.024, .038]). Values below .05 indicate close model fit, with the upper CI remaining below .04.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .99. Values exceeding .95 indicate good structural specification.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .045. Values below .08 indicate low average correlation discrepancies between observed and implied covariance matrices.

Factor Loadings and Structural Parameterization

All 24 items loaded significantly onto their designated latent constructs. Standardized factor loadings ranged from .62 to .74 (p < .001). No significant cross-loadings or substantial error covariances were detected, supporting a clean seven-factor structural configuration.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Determinants of Support for COVID-19 Lockdown Measures—Model Inventory is structured as follows:

• Test Type: Original psychometric survey inventory; multi-dimensional health psychology and political attitude assessment.
• Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire, suitable for paper-and-pencil or online psychometric administration platforms.
• Target Population: Adult general population (tested on Chinese citizens; average age = 29.7 years; male and female adults).
• Total Item Count: 24 items across seven subscale domains.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert response scale ranging from:
• 1 = Strongly Disagree
• 2 = Disagree
• 3 = Somewhat Disagree
• 4 = Neutral (Neither Agree nor Disagree)
• 5 = Somewhat Agree
• 6 = Agree
• 7 = Strongly Agree
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • Communitarian Worldviews: Assesses civic responsibility, collectivism, and communal solidarity over individual liberties.
  • Perceived Susceptibility: Evaluates perceived vulnerability to viral infection.
  • Perceived Severity: Quantifies beliefs about the medical and societal consequences of disease spread.
  • Experiential Attitudes: Gauges affective, emotional, and visceral responses to confinement.
  • Instrumental Attitudes: Measures cognitive appraisals of the lockdown’s practical utility and effectiveness.
  • Subjective Norms: Measures perceived social pressures from family, peers, and social reference groups.
  • Policy Support: Measures direct public endorsement and willingness to adhere to mandatory lockdown mandates.
• Scoring Procedures: Items within each subscale are summed and averaged to generate separate continuous index scores (ranging from 1.0 to 7.0) for each of the seven dimensions. Higher scores correspond to higher levels of the respective construct. Alternatively, structural equation modeling (SEM) can be implemented using latent variable modeling with weighted factor scores.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Determinants of Support for COVID-19 Lockdown Measures—Model Inventory was developed and published in 2022 (with inclusion in formal psychometric compendiums occurring in 2023). The instrument is designed for academic, non-commercial, and public health surveillance research.

• Commercial Exploitation: Strictly prohibited without formal licensing agreements.
• Academic Research Fees: No usage fees are assessed for non-profit academic or public health research.
• Permissions & Inquiries: Researchers wishing to utilize, translate, or adapt the inventory should contact the corresponding author:
  
  Xiao Wang, Ph.D.
  
  School of Communication, Rochester Institute of Technology
  
  92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623, United States
  
  Email: [email protected]

References

Becker, M. H. (1974). The health belief model and personal health behavior. Health Education Monographs, 2(4), 324–473. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019817400200401

Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (2010). Predicting and changing behavior: The reasoned action approach. Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203838020

Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104

Hair, J. F., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J., & Anderson, R. E. (2019). Multivariate data analysis (8th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118

Kahan, D. M., Jenkins-Smith, H., & Braman, D. (2011). Cultural cognition of scientific consensus. Journal of Risk Research, 14(2), 147–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2010.511246

Rosenstock, I. M. (1974). Historical origins of the health belief model. Health Education Monographs, 2(4), 328–335. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019817400200403

Triandis, H. C., & Gelfand, M. J. (1998). Converging measurement of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(1), 118–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.1.118

Wang, X. (2022). Factors associated with public support for a lockdown measure in China during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 25(4), 658–673. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12526

Items of the Scale