Community resilience enhances epidemic prevention: Moderating role of residents’ participation in community-based epidemic prevention

Abstract

Technologies and processes that can reduce infectious disease spread are relatively well developed, but, how to implement these public health measures at the community level remains a challenge. Building community resilience is a way to address this challenge. This study aims to assess the impact of community resilience on community-level epidemic prevention effectiveness, along with residents’ participation in community-based epidemic prevention (RPCBEP) as a possible moderator of this association. To reflect the multidimensional nature of community resilience, we further screened key resilience factors affecting community epidemic prevention effectiveness and verified the moderating role of RPCBEP on the association between key resilience factors and community epidemic prevention effectiveness. A total of 2275 resident questionnaires from 110 communities of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China, were collected in July–August 2022. Moderation analysis was performed using the Process 3.3 macro. The results showed that community resilience, in general, and the key factors of leadership and preparedness in particular were positively associated with community epidemic prevention effectiveness. Moreover, RPCBEP played a positive moderating role in all these associations. Our study has focused on the community effectiveness of the public health measures from community resilience and citizen participation, enriching the study of policy effectiveness in the context of public health crises. Our findings indicated that community epidemic prevention effectiveness not only requires systematic resilient capacity construction but is also closely related to the active participation behaviors of residents. Our results highlight the important role of community governance of a combination of “top-down” and “bottom-up” in epidemic prevention.