Abstract

     Facing the Covid outbreaks, public health researchers share a consensus that community resilience should be maintained and strengthened because it helps mitigate the physical and emotional tolls on individuals and communities. One way to achieve the goal is to build and strengthen community resilience through social media. However, social media’s role in building community resilience has been poorly understood from a behavioral perspective. Guiding by uses and gratification theory and the coping literature, we build a model to examine how social media behaviors may influence community members’ perceived community resilience, providing a “bottom-up” voice to deepen our understanding of community resilience and its implications for public health. The results shows that community members’ social media engagement was significantly associated with their perceived community resilience. While helping others on social media led people to perceive their communities as less resilient, the use of social media for social support helped foster social capital, leading to more perceived resilience at the collective level. Overall, social media use played important roles in shaping people’s perception of community resilience, helping community members and organizations evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and make improvement to better address future challenges in the times of global disasters.

Introduction

     Resilience has gained increasing attention these years as a fundamental construct to disaster preparedness, emergency response, and crisis recovery. Facing the Covid pandemic, there is a consensus among public health researchers that community resilience should be maintained and strengthened (Zhang, 2022) as it helps mitigate both physical and emotional tolls on individuals and communities (Zhong, Jiang, et al., 2020). Community resilience incorporates individual-level response and preparedness with a networked social support system in communities to withstand and recover from public health emergencies (Norris et al., 2008). How individuals perceive their communities as being resilient or bouncing back from the devastation wrought by a pandemic can be an important component of the recovery process in terms of allocating resources, imparting information, or providing assistance for others. The construction of a resilient community relies heavily on networked social support and resources. Increasingly, social media have become a central part of emergency responses and resilience construction with timely information exchange and promotion of connectedness for social support as core strengths (Houston, Hawthorne, et al., 2015; Taylor et al., 2012). Studies on social media use after natural disasters or health crises have outlined the roles social media play in the timely communication of critical information (Cho et al., 2013; Jin et al., 2014), social support (Tandoc & Takahashi, 2017), and psychological well-being (Taylor et al., 2012). However, social media’s role in resilience construction has been poorly understood from a behavioral perspective. To advance our knowledge on resilience construction in the social media era under the context of a global health crisis like Covid, we examine the relations between social media use and perceived community resilience.

Conclusions

     The importance of community resilience has gained recognition from scholars, policymakers, and international organizations. The World Health Organization has encouraged its member states to build resilient communities and supportive environments as a public health priority (WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2013). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also highlighted the construction of community resilience as one of the two major focuses of its National Health Security Strategy (Morton & Lurie, 2013). By providing a “bottom-up” voice about how people perceive community resilience during the pandemic, the current study highlights the importance of using social media as a community-based coping strategy during a public health crisis. The results should be used to promote community resilience by gaining social support and strengthening networked social capitals utilizing social media platforms. This becomes imperative to communities in a social distancing time, where social media become the major form of community-based communication. Through the examination of social media’s role in building perceived community resilience during the Covid pandemic, this study contributed to the expanding application of community resilience to the effort of coping with public health crises and other disastrous conditions. The growing recognition of constructing community resilience as an attempt to combat public health challenges among health practitioners and researchers has become even more salient in the context of the current global pandemic.