Attitudes of the audience towards media messages on face mask use regarding the COVID-19 pandemic: From compliance to slacking

Abstract

The study focused on the transition from compliance to slacking in the audience’s attitudes towards media messages encouraging the use of face masks to avoid COVID-19. It employed the survey and multimodal analysis designs based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). A sample of the messages on the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) website and YouTube were chosen for the multimodal analysis using purposive sampling. Findings showed that social media was one of the ways that most respondents commonly heard or saw messages about using face masks. Though short-term positive attitude and compliance were found, it mainly became inconsistent over time, despite the media blitz on the benefits of masking up. It recommended that there was an urgent need to re-contextualize media messages on using face masks by adopting a bottom-up strategy and a hybrid of communication approaches.