This study explored factors predicting the positive coping behavior of the elderly via a new perspective by testing a proposed conceptual model in which social network, information acquisition, and perceived community support are considered significant in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings from a large sample of the Chinese elderly showed that social network (network strength and network heterogeneity) and information acquisition are directly associated with the COVID-19 positive coping behavior and indirectly through perceived community support. In general, results from the 916 Chinese elderlies supported our hypotheses, which contributed to a deeper understanding of the link between social network, information acquisition, and positive coping behavior in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
More specifically, our findings confirmed that social network plays a positive and significant role in the elderly’s COVID-19 positive coping behavior. Network strength was found to predict positive coping behavior directly and indirectly (through perceived community support). In other words, strong social ties could help the elderly respond more positively to turbulent challenges [96, 97]. This finding contradicted earlier studies that did not target the specific elderly group and suggested that weak ties promote positive behavior [98]. Also, though strong social relationships can provide people with greater support [99, 100], the present finding demonstrated that the expansion of the network size did not necessarily predict greater social support for the elderly, as it was challenging to ensure that the members of these networks are all able to provide effective support for the elderly [101]. This suggests that expanding social network by simply meeting more new people to increase the breadth may not impact much on positive coping behavior in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic; It is the depth of the social network that people bond together with an intense, well-connected relationship that counts [27]. Especially when they also have good relationship quality, there will be a significant impact on their well-being and positive outcomes [102]. Therefore, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is necessary to keep in touch with and be strongly connected with family members, friends, and community members to make them feel safe and stay happy via different social media for information [103]; Maintaining close contact while also improving the relationship quality [102] will effectively relieve the elderly’s anxiety, loneliness, and other negative emotions, and meet their spiritual needs to improve the knowledge and ability to use the psychological balance to deal with epidemic diseases [104].
Concerning network heterogeneity on positive coping behavior, in line with our expectations, the specific direct effect of social network heterogeneity on positive coping behavior was positive and significant among the elderly. This also favors the previously reported model of positive coping behavior [105, 106]. As high levels of network heterogeneity can promote people’s political participation and encourage people to adopt COVID-19 positive coping behavior, the highly heterogeneous social network can indeed provide the necessary diversified support for the elderly due to its diversity of people with a variety of age groups, professions, and education backgrounds, thus, making the elderly take advantage of more positive coping behavior in public health emergencies [107]. Therefore, further enriching the elderly’s social network relationships by developing different groups of social networks (network heterogeneity) is conducive to promoting their positive coping and, then, their physical and mental health and well-being [105].
Regarding the effect of information acquisition on the positive coping behavior of the elderly, our findings contradicted previous studies, which indicated that higher levels of information access could promote people’s positive coping behavior [108, 109]. One possible explanation might be that, for the elderly, a higher level of information acquisition does not guarantee a higher quality of information. Too much information or information load exposed to the elderly may bring about confusion. It is, therefore, possible that the overall quality of information, irrespective of the breadth or depth, can help the elderly, which is consistent with Irwin’s research on the impact of information accuracy on behavior [66, 110]. For instance, actively acquiring accurate information and knowledge about the COVID-19 pandemic help motivate the elderly to adopt positive coping behavior (i.e., social distancing, meeting avoidance, hand washing, and mask-wearing) [111].
Our results, by confirming prior works, revealed a partial mediation effect that the perceived community support played between network strength and positive coping behavior [112, 113]. This is consistent with the understanding of expanding the social network of the elderly to strengthen their resistance to changes [114, 115]. The elderly needs comprehensive, stable, and in-depth communication to maintain their health and well-being. As the primary carrier of social relations, the community where the elderly performs their daily activities should provide information access [116].
In addition, perceived community support partially mediated the link between information acquisition and positive coping behavior. In response to the call for research on personal information access during the global health crisis [117], this study explores the elderly who cannot obtain effective information through verification. A research pointed out that, although the elderly have different access to information from other groups [118], their perceived community support can be enhanced through the community resources which they can use to exchange information [119]. Meanwhile, despite the necessary quarantine of residential communities, community workers can also provide timely help to the vulnerable elderly people to promote their perception of community support [120], thus encouraging their positive coping behavior [121].
This work has three contributions. First, the findings are based on a large population of 916 Chinese elderly aged between 60 and 96, which helps provide concrete evidence supporting the theoretical literature. Second, concurrent researches often focus on the direct impact of perceived community support on behavior while neglecting the underlying mechanisms [122, 123]. While this study applied the SEM to detect the contributing factors (social network, information acquisition, and perceived community support) that may predict positive coping behavior and to examine the underlying mechanism. Last but not least, the elderly, as a vulnerable population more susceptible to the COVID-19 pandemic threat, are less quickly and efficiently in terms of acquiring external information [2] and need more focus with great efforts to improve their ability to respond to actively and cope with such a pandemic crisis.
Unavoidably, this study has limits that warrant notice for future research. First, our sample source is restricted to Chengdu, a capital city in Southwest China. Therefore, future generalization work of the present findings may profit from exploring the elderly from other regions in China, other countries, and cultures. In addition, exploring the causal inference from such a cross-sectional survey data set is impossible. We are not sure if a bettered social network is beneficial for the elderly to take more positive and effective coping strategies, which in turn shows that those extroverts who like to accept changes from the outside world actively will inevitably have more diverse access to social information. Therefore, ongoing studies via experimental or longitudinal design to test its causal inference are appealing to address such a direction in future works. Third, our survey tools, though derived from literature scales with acceptable reliability and validity, underwent translation procedures, and misperceptions caused by cultural differences may have an impact on the results. Besides, it should be noted that positive coping behavior is predicted by various factors (e.g., personal, contextual, economic, educational, etc.) beyond the ones explored in the present work. Therefore, the SEM with more comprehensive indicators and qualitative comparative analysis for their combing effect on positive coping of the elderly is worth exploring in future work.