earticle

영어

Contact tracing applications have become one of the most promising tools to slow the further spread of the coronavirus in many countries. Since first documented in China, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has affected all aspects of society in serious long-term ways. Tragically, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused more than 6 million deaths and even set back the world economy by decades of progress. It brings permanent changes and reshapes people's lives in numerous ways, and what is worse is that no one knows when the crisis will end exactly. Evidence shows that contact tracing applications would be effective in stopping the pandemic only if enough people used them, which implies how important it is to motivate more people to use these applications in the future. In addition, South Korea and China have been much more successful in controlling the spread of the virus compared with the United States and most European countries. Therefore, this study seeks to investigate the uptake of COVID-19 contact tracing applications in South Korea and China. In particular, drawing on Agency Theory, we aim to examine the determinants of application use and compare the differences between these two countries. In addition, we attempt to identify the moderating effects of privacy concerns and the mediating effects of implementation intention in terms of the use of COVID-19 contact tracing applications. Thus, we conducted a survey-based cross-country field study, and we recruited samples of undergraduate and graduate students from South Korea and China separately. As a result, we found a large gap regarding the uptake of COVID-19 contact tracing applications in two countries. In the case of South Korea, self-regulation was the primary determinant, whereas government regulation was the primary factor in the Chinese sample. The current study contributes to the literature on both public health and information privacy, and more significantly, it suggests how we can motivate more people to use such applications to prevent the further spread of COVID-19.