The Role of Honor Concerns in Disclosing (vs. Hiding) COVID-19 Diagnosis: Insights from Türkiye

Date

2023-01-01

Author

Ceylan-Batur, Suzan
Doğulu, Canay
Akbaş, Gülçin
Yet, Barbaros
Uskul, Ayse K.

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

16
views

0
downloads

Cite This

Members of honor cultures value engaging in moral behaviors and managing their social image to maintain their honor. These two goals reflect reputation and integrity concerns, which also have bearing on gender roles. In the current study, we examined a) evaluations of women and men described as diagnosed with COVID-19 and as either hiding or disclosing their diagnosis, b) the moderating role of honor concerns (reputation and integrity) and the gender of the infected person in these evaluations, and c) the relationship between honor concerns and individuals’ own disclosure preferences among participants living in Türkiye, a country that exemplifies an honor culture. Findings revealed that participants with stronger reputation concerns evaluated a woman’s hiding behavior more favorably than that of a man’s. Moreover, higher integrity concerns were associated with lower levels of participants’ own preference to hide a diagnosis for both men and women, whereas reputation concerns were positively associated with a preference for hiding a diagnosis among men only. Furthermore, a content analysis of participants’ open-ended explanations of their views on women’s and men’s motivation to hide a diagnosis revealed further evidence for the gendered nature of reputation concerns. Our findings point to the importance of prioritizing integrity concerns (and downplaying reputation concerns) in public health campaigns in honor cultures.

Subject Keywords

COVID-19, Gender, Hiding and disclosing diagnosis, Honor culture, Integrity, Reputation, Türkiye

URI

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85161813767&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/104626

Collections

Graduate School of Informatics, Article