3.2. Design and Procedure
infection, OSF, COVID-19 infection
HAND INFECTION, DISEASE, COVID-19 INFECTION, INFECTION, CORONAVIRUS
An online experiment with a 2 (severity infection narrative: low vs. high) × 2 (infection target: narrative’s protagonist vs. protagonist’s father) between-subject factorial design was carried out. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions, where they were asked to read a narrative message in the form of a Twitter thread describing a COVID-19 infection (with mild or severe symptoms) that affected either the protagonist of the message (a 23-year-old young person) or their father.The questionnaire used was divided into three main blocks: pretest measures, the narrative messages in the form of a Twitter thread, and post-test measures. The first block included an introduction and informed consent. In addition, demographic information was requested (gender, age, country of residence) and included measures on the degree of perceived knowledge about COVID-19 (how they would rate their level of knowledge about coronavirus), the level of personal concern about the COVID-19 pandemic situation (to what extent they felt concerned about the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic), the level of concern for a possible COVID-19 infection (how often they worried about the possibility of contracting coronavirus) and the question “Do any close relatives have or have had the COVID-19?”.Immediately after completing the pretest measures, participants were randomly assigned to the experimental conditions, which involved reading a testimonial message. Since two aspects of the message were manipulated (severity infection narrative and infection target), four different versions of the same message were constructed. All versions showed a similar beginning and ending, and only the elements related to the severity of the disease symptoms and the infection target varied. The developed messages (see Independent Variables and Stimulus Materials) were between 213 and 219 words in total, and the estimated reading time was calculated to be 90 s (with a text readability tool, After reading the testimonial message, participants completed post-test measures to assess the mediating variables (perceived severity infection, identification with the protagonist, narrative transportation, cognitive elaboration, reactance) and dependent variables (perceived personal risk of COVID-19 infection, perceived severity of COVID-19 and protective behavioral intent against COVID-19). In addition, participants were asked a number of questions to evaluate their retention of key details from the narrative, such as the name and age of the protagonist and who in the story had contracted COVID-19.Since Qualtrics allowed for a series of quality controls to be implemented, the questionnaire was designed in such a way that it could only be completed in a single session. The average duration to complete the entire process (pretest, message reading and post-test) was approximately 10 min (M = 9.93 min, SD = 4.55, All materials related to the online experiment (testimonial messages, measures, datasets and syntax files) are available via the Open Science Framework (OSF): 