Updated Version: Adherence to Quarantine Protocols to Prevent the Spread of COVID-19: The Moderating Effect of Social Media Campaigns (Revised and Updated)
The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally reshaped how communities’ access and respond to public health information, positioning social media as a dominant channel for behavioral guidance. This study investigates the moderating role of social media campaigns on the relationships between Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) constructs—attitude, subjective norm, self-efficacy, and controllability—and adherence to COVID-19 quarantine protocols among Metro Manila residents. Using a quantitative predictive design, data were collected from 413 respondents across 16 cities and one municipality in Metro Manila during the August-September 2020 Enhanced Community Quarantine and General Community Quarantine transition. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) revealed that attitude, controllability, and social media directly and significantly predicted quarantine adherence. Social media significantly moderated all four TPB-adherence relationships—attitude, subjective norm, self-efficacy, and controllability—indicating that social media universally amplified compliance-related behavioral antecedents. Subjective norm and self-efficacy did not significantly predict adherence in their direct paths; several explanations are considered, including autonomous motivational orientations, measurement constraints associated with social isolation conditions, enforcement intensity during the ECQ-to-GCQ transition, and risk perception effects not directly captured in the model. Findings carry important implications for pandemic communication strategy design, health behavior theory, and digital media policy in collectivist, high-social-media-use societies.
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