Institution efficiency satisfaction and emotional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Arab citizens of Israel: An exploratory cross-sectional study

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the emergence of various stressors among people around the world. However, rare are the studies that investigate stressors by employing institution evaluations as their predictors in ethnic minorities. The goal of the current study was to examine the association between satisfaction with the efficiency of institutions' work on mitigation of the COVID-19 spread, and stressors - emotional responses to the pandemic: worry of the COVID-19 spread, and fear of being hurt by its spread. The study was conducted among Israeli Arab citizens (N = 697), who participated in an annual personal security index survey. Multinomial logistic regression was used for the multivariate analysis. The main finding suggests that satisfaction with efficiency of the emergency institutions performance was associated with a lower likelihood of being highly worried of COVID-19 spread, as well as with a lower likelihood of having a great fear of being hurt by its spread. Satisfaction with efficiency of societal institutions performance was associated only with lower likelihood of being moderately worried of the COVID-19 spread. The results imply that the institutions have an ability to reduce the stressors in population by means of efficient performance in mitigating the consequences of the pandemic. The results also imply that institutions differ in this ability. The main policy implication is that institutions, which efficiency satisfaction was unrelated to the stressors, should significantly improve such performance in order to reduce the magnitude of negative emotional responses in ethnic minorities.