Behavioral and Psychological Responses towards Coronavirus Disease: A Study of the Employees in Garment Industry, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Employees are a valuable resource among the various resources within an organization. Moreover, it is important for their employees to maintain good health and well-being a crisis like COVID-19 pandemic. Extant research has found that factors that influence the behavioral and psychological responses to coronavirus disease include age, gender, monthly income, and level of education. However, most of these studies are based on Western countries. Therefore, we know little about the Sri Lankan situation. Thus, the aim of the study was to identify behavioral and psychological responses to corona virus infection in Sri Lankan garment workers. The study is cross-sectional in nature and researcher collected data from 750 employees in the garment industry in Sri Lanka. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire and data were analyzed with the aid of the SPSS software. One-way ANOVA and independent sample t-test were used to test the hypotheses. The results show that there is a significant mean difference of age, gender, monthly income and education level when employees show the behavioral responses towards the pandemic. The results of this study provide significant contribution to health and safely literature. Moreover, these findings provide significant insights to the policy makers and decision makers, in the garment industry in Sri Lanka.