The relationship between young college students' recognition of national COVID-19 crisis governance capabilities and the improvement of national identity: the mediating role of online participation in public health critical events.

Background: Improving the young college students' national identity is crucial for ensuring social stability and fostering development during public health critical events such as COVID-19. Young college students' recognition of national COVID-19 crisis governance capabilities can influence their national identity, and online participation in public health criticalevents may serve as a crucial role in shaping this intricate relationship. To investigate this possibility, the present study established an intermediary model to examine the impact of online participation in public health critical events on young college students' recognition of national COVID-19 crisis governance capabilities and improvement of national identity.

Methods: This cross-sectional survey study employed a convenience sampling method to investigate a total of 3041 young college students in China. The correlations between study variables were analyzed using Spearman's rank correlation. The mediation model was established using PROCESS Model 4 with 5000 bootstrap samples in SPSS. The bias-corrected bootstrap method provided statistical efficacy and identification interval estimation.

Results: Young college students' recognition of national COVID-19 crisis governance capabilities ( r =0.729, P <0.001) and online participation in public health critical events ( r =0.609, P <0.001) were positively correlated with improvement of their national identity. The relationship between these two factors was partially mediated by online participation in public health critical events (Indirect effect estimate=0.196, P <0.001).

Conclusion: Online participation in public health critical events played a mediating role in the association between college students' recognition of national COVID-19 crisis governance capabilities and the improvement of national identity. Our findings provide a novel intervention strategy for improving college students' national identity, which is to encourage their online participation in public health critical events.

Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

(Copyright © 2024 Xie, Zhu, Tan and Gao.)