A Cross-National Study of Fear Appeal Messages in YouTube Trending Videos About Covid-19
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3759488 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yee Man Margaret Ng (0000-0001-5043-9159, Department of Journalism and Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 69 |
| Issue | 9 |
| Pages | 1092-1112 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Behavioral Scientist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-7642 • E-ISSN: 1552-3381 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00027642231155363 |
| OpenAlex | W4321453462 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 37 |
The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need for investigating the prevalence and nature of health communication on social media. Applying the Extended Parallel Process Model, this study analyzes the use of fear appeals in 2,152 YouTube trending videos across six countries (the United States, Brazil, Russia, Taiwan, Canada, and New Zealand) from January to May 2020. The findings reveal that, during the early stage of the outbreak, COVID-19-themed videos gained early attention in Taiwan but encountered a prolonged delay in the United States and Brazil. Specifically, COVID-19 videos featured the least in Brazil's trending list. The results from a supervised machine learning coding approach further suggest that videos' threat levels exceeded efficacy beliefs across all countries. This imbalance of threat-efficacy messages was most significant in hard-hit countries Brazil and Russia, which social media may run the risk of feeding fear to the public agenda. These findings alert content creators and social media platforms to create a threat-efficacy equilibrium, prioritizing content that promotes a sense of self- and community efficacy and increases people's belief that effective protective actions are available
Advertising · Appeal · Business · Coding (social sciences) · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Disease · Fear appeal · Infectious disease (medical specialty) · Pandemic · Political science · Public relations · Social media · Social science · Sociology · Behavioral Health and Interventions · Media Influence and Health · Medicine · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Psychology · Social Psychology
An Application of Hierarchical Kappa-type Statistics in the Assessment of Majority Agreement among Multiple Observers
Using EPPM to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Fear Appeal Messages Across Different Media Outlets to Increase the Intention of Breast Self-Examination Among Chinese Women
YouTube channels, uploads and views
The Regression Analysis of Binary Sequences
A New Dimension of Health Care
A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals
Random Forests
YouTube as a source of information on Covid-19
Just Turn on the Faucet
Are You Scared Yet? Evaluating Fear Appeal Messages in Tweets About the Tips Campaign
YouTube as a source of medical information on the novel coronavirus 2019 disease (Covid-19) pandemic
Using data visualizations to study digital public spaces
Putting the fear back into fear appeals
No Longer Lost in Translation
Fear Won't Do It
Simultaneous pairwise multiple comparison procedures for means when sample sizes are unequal
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |