Factors Affecting Compliance with Alerts in the Context of Healthcare-related Emergencies

This study is a conceptual replication of the study by Han et al. (2015) in which the authors evaluated factors affecting students’ compliance with emergency instructions during campus emergencies. The current study focused on broader public health-related emergencies using eight scenarios evaluated by Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) participants. Analysis on the aggregated data showed that subjective norm and trust in information quality positively affected intention to comply with instructions, consistent with the original study. Three follow up analyses provide more nuanced results. First, an abridged dataset was created by filtering out participants whose reasons for non-immediate compliance weren't related to verifying information and then complying. Analysis on this dataset showed that subjective norm no longer positively affected intention to comply. Second, scenarios used in the study were grouped by characteristics such as development speed, frequency, and area affected, and the analysis was redone. Factors affecting intention to comply immediately changed based on the characteristic, with subjective norm positively affected intention to comply in slow-developing scenarios, scenarios that affect at a limited area, and commonly occurring scenarios, while trust in information quality affects the other scenarios. Third, recall of information from the notification was collected from participants and analyzed. Results show that participants who chose to comply immediately recalled more information than others. Our replication study shows some support for the original conclusions; however, the broader setting and more nuanced analyses show also differences between both studies.