Environmental mastery and purpose of life during COVID-19-related lockdown: A study deepening the role of personal and community resilience

COVID-19 outbreak and the measures needed to contain its first wave of contagion produced broad changes in citizens' daily lives, routines, and social opportunities, putting their environmental mastery and purpose of life at risk. However, these measures produced different impacts across citizens and communities. Building on this, the present study addresses citizens' understanding of the rationale for COVID-19-related protective measures and their perception of their own and their community's resilience as protective dimensions to unravel the selective effect of nationwide lockdown orders. An online questionnaire was administered to Italian citizens during Italian nationwide lockdown. Two moderation models were performed using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) path analysis. The results show that the understanding of the rationale for lockdown only associated with citizens' purpose of life and that it represented a risk factor rather than a protective one. Furthermore, the interaction effects were significant only when community resilience was involved. That is, personal resilience did not show the expected moderation effect, while community resilience did. However, the latter varied between being either full or partial depending on the dependent variable. In light of the above, the theoretical and practical implications of these results will be discussed.