Americans much more wary than South Koreans about sharing whereabouts to help counter COVID
Americans’ famous affinity for rugged individualism may help explain why there’s more resistance to location-based COVID mitigation efforts here than in many other parts of the world.
A survey-based comparison study published this month in the International Journal of Geo-Information seems to support that hypothesis.
The researchers solicited 306 adults—188 in the U.S. and 118 in South Korea—for their views on contact tracing, quarantine monitoring and public mapping of sites recently visited by COVID-positive individuals.
Lead researcher Junghwan Kim, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois, was assisted in the work by Mei-Po Kwan, a geography professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Upon analyzing the responses, the team found South Koreans significantly more likely to embrace these interventions for various reasons.
For one, South Koreans tend to be more likely to have a “strong collectivist orientation” and to be less concerned about privacy than Americans due to cultural factors, Kim and Kwan report.
This may have been the case historically, even before the Korean War of the 1950s, they note. Either way, since then, generations of South Koreans have grown up accepting tech-based surveillance systems, from closed-circuit TV to facial recognition software, both of which “are generally considered to be helpful for promoting national security.”
What’s more, early on in the present pandemic, South Korea was among the countries that had success keeping COVID in check with mitigation measures.
As a result, the country’s residents see good sense in continuing with those measures, Kim and Kwan suggest.
The authors underscore that the project’s primary interest was in understanding differences in attitudes toward COVID mitigation actions vis-à-vis privacy concerns and perceptions of social benefits.
“Although other factors might also affect people’s acceptance of various COVID-19 mitigation measures, such as the severity of COVID-19 and trust in government agencies, examining whether these factors affect acceptance was not the primary purpose of this paper,” they write.
Coverage of the study by the University of Illinois’s news bureau highlights the study’s public policy implications.
“For example, the use of phone-based or wristband GPS tracking ‘would not be effective in the U.S. and other countries where people’s acceptance of these methods is very low,’” the news item reads. “Other approaches, such as random phone calls to monitor people’s compliance with quarantine orders or the use of travel certificates that verify a person’s COVID-19-negative status, would likely work better in such societies.”
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.