Estudo de atitudes implícitas sobre a adoção de medidas preventivas da contaminação da COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the reality of millions of people, causing them to change their social, hygiene and work habits, also having impacts on the mental health of the population. Some preventive measures against COVID-19, such as wearing a mask, hand hygiene and social distance, were implemented in order to contain the spread of this disease. As a result, some explicit measures evaluating the population's adherence to preventive measures have been used in some studies. However, such measures may have social desirability biases, that is, the subject answers what he or she believes to be the socially appropriate response, but does not necessarily behave in accordance with what is reported. One way to deal with these problems of explicit measures is to use implicit measures instruments, that makes it difficult for the subject to elaborate a different response to their practices and biases. Within the field of Behavior Analysis, a procedure that has been used to assess implicit attitudes is the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), in which the subject must respond to consistent and inconsistent relations between stimuli, with faster responses to relations consistent with their learning history being expected. The present study aimed investigate and explore the use of IRAP in the assessment and identification of implicit attitudes related to adherence to preventive measures against COVID-19. Exploratory analyzes of other explicit measures, such as a sociodemographic questionnaire and a reported generalized anxiety scale, were also carried out in order to verify relevant variables that could impact the use of preventive measures. The IRAP was created and presented the words “Risk” or “Protection” together with images of preventive measures and non-preventive measures of COVID-19. An explicit measurement scale was created to assess adherence and frequency of the use of preventive measures and to be able to separate the participants into two distinct groups: one with a high frequency of behaviors for preventive measures (MP) and another with a low frequency of these behaviors (MNp). Overall, the MP group had better latency results for preventive measures than the MNp group for three of the four trial-types of IRAP. Discussions about the different types of trials and properties of the IRAP stimuli based on the DAARRE model were made. The possible impacts of variables present in the sociodemographic questionnaire and in the reported generalized anxiety scale were discussed.