April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: Leveraging Sense of Community Responsibility (SOC-R) to Connect Individual Actions to Collective and Civic Well-being
Beyond fulfillment of basic human needs (e.g., the need for belonging or group identification), sense of community as a responsibility-based construct (as put forth by Nowell & Boyd, 2010) seeks to explain why individuals take actions to protect others in their community absent a direct benefit to themselves. Sense of Community Responsibility (SOC-R) theory (Nowell & Boyd, 2010; 2014) proposes that people develop personal belief systems through their involvement in social institutions – such as family, friend, and faith groups – and that these belief systems govern what they deem to be appropriate behavior in certain social contexts. In other words, it is not just what can be gained through community affiliation, but also what an individual is responsible for doing within and for the collective that reinforces sense of community. The willingness to engage in behaviors that are not normative or preferred, when considered to be appropriate actions, may also foster feelings of accountability for community well-being. Thus, a desire to achieve consistency between the personal belief systems (the well-being of my community matters) held by an individual and their personal actions (preventive behaviors that benefit the whole) may lead to the adoption of prosocial attitudes and behaviors (Nowell & Boyd, 2010). As part of a larger study on the impact of responsibility-based communicative efforts among university students and how that communication occurs during a health crisis, we looked at how identification within a community context can evoke personal beliefs, specifically beliefs about the appropriateness of adopting certain prosocial behaviors. Key areas of inquiry included: What about the community context triggers a sense of community responsibility? What specific message characteristics activate an individual’s sense of community (e.g., message source, content)? Once achieved, can SOC-R be leveraged to motivate prosocial behaviors? And are messages from community members more convincing than those from individuals who are not viewed as members of a shared community? To address these questions, we measured study participant responses to a series of social media messages designed to trigger SOC-R and a willingness to adopt specific prosocial attitudes and behaviors. Data on source characteristics (e.g., gender, race, age) was collected and respondents were asked to identify the extent to which the message source and content appear to come from a peer (i.e., someone they consider to be a member of their community). Positioned within SOC-R scholarship, this work conceptualizes one’s perceived peer group as a community setting. This research advances our understanding of what it means to experience a sense of community, what connects individuals to the communities to which they belong, and how that can be leveraged to promote behaviors that protect and/or benefit society at large. Specifically, it explores the relationship between likelihood to accept a message or call to action by a source perceived to be a member of one’s own community, which will allow for the development of effective messages that connect individual actions to collective and civic well-being.