Language and the cultural markers of COVID-19.
COVID-19
Culture
Language
Spatial regression discontinuity
Journal
Social science & medicine (1982)
ISSN: 1873-5347
Titre abrégé: Soc Sci Med
Pays: England
ID NLM: 8303205
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
05 2022
05 2022
Historique:
received:
26
10
2021
revised:
14
02
2022
accepted:
09
03
2022
pubmed:
21
3
2022
medline:
7
6
2022
entrez:
20
3
2022
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
Despite its universal nature, the impact of COVID-19 has not been geographically homogeneous. While certain countries and regions have been severely affected, registering record infection rates and excess deaths, others experienced only milder outbreaks. We investigate to what extent human factors, in particular cultural origins reflected in different attitudes and behavioural norms, can explain different degrees of exposure to the virus. Motivated by the linguistic relativity hypothesis, we take language as a proxy for cultural origins and exploit the exogenous variation in the language spoken around the border that divides the French- and German-speaking parts of Switzerland to estimate the impact of culture on exposure to COVID-19. The results obtained using a spatial regression discontinuity design reveal, that within 50- and 25- kilometres bandwidth from the language border, the average COVID-19 exposure levels for individuals in French speaking municipalities was higher. In particular, we find that German speaking municipalities were associated with a reduction of around 40% - 50% in the odds of COVID-19 exposure compared to the French speaking municipalities.
Identifiants
pubmed: 35306267
pii: S0277-9536(22)00192-7
doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.114886
pmc: PMC8923013
pii:
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
114886Informations de copyright
Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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