Assessment of Perceptions and impacts of COVID-19, and adherence to Public Health Recommendations among Black/ African Americans

Abstract

We evaluated the associations between health belief model (HBM) constructs and adherence to COVID-19 public health recommendations (PHR) among 433 Black/African Americans (AA) in the US. We found that participants’ perceived severity, perceived benefits, and perceived barriers were posi- tively associated with PHR (p<.01), and the variables accounted for 25% of the variance. Factors such as worrying about health and worrying about living conditions were associated with participants’ anxiety and depressive symptoms (p<.01) accounting for 12.6 and 9.2% of the variance respectively. HBM con- structs could be used to develop an intervention to encourage adherence to COVID-19 PHR among AA.