The more you know, the better you act? Institutional communication in Covid-19 crisis management

The plurality of communication channels and the spread of fake news are widespread phenomena in today’s society. Those constituted a serious risk during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis management, increasing the confusion among the population. This research aims at assessing the effectiveness of institutional communication amid the management of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis in Italy. We first assessed the phenomenon by building a structured theoretical background stressing the concepts of risk communication, community engagement, and health literacy, highlighting the dynamic and continuously changing scenario of communication strategies, also due to the spread of social media and the mutation of conventional media outlets. We sent a questionnaire to a sample of citizens to assess the impact of three predictors, i.e., the perceived communication, the perceived knowledge, and the perceived information. Based on answers, we built an ordered logit model assigning continuous intervals as values for the dependent variables. The observed results enhanced the crucial role of the phenomenon of health literacy and the impact of asymmetric information on the effectiveness of institutional communication. Education played a fundamental role in understanding communication pillars and building an individual consciousness about health risks prevention.