RAPID: Media Exposure, Objective Knowledge, Risk Perceptions, and Risk Management Preferences of Americans Regarding the Novel Coronavirus Outbreak

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Branden Johnson, Oregon Research Institute; Marcus Mayorga

Version: View help for Version V1

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Project Citation:

Johnson, Branden, and Mayorga, Marcus. RAPID: Media Exposure, Objective Knowledge, Risk Perceptions, and Risk Management Preferences of Americans Regarding the Novel Coronavirus Outbreak. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2025-02-01. https://doi.org/10.3886/E215382V1

Project Description

Summary: Risk analysis has a long history of assessing the antecedents and outcomes of public risk perceptions, and their mutual relationships, but has emphasized cross-sectional rather than longitudinal studies as being more feasible. However, cross-sectional studies not only fail to track the dynamics of these factors and their relationships over time—which is particularly crucial in understanding responses to a novel hazard such as that posed by the COVID-19 pandemic—but they are unable to test even some basic hypotheses for hazard management, such as whether a person with high risk perceptions at one time is likely to have enacted protective behaviors at a later time, or that a person who has adopted several protective behaviors at one time is likely to have lower risk perceptions at a later time. This does not mean that cross-sectional studies are useless, only that scholars of risk perceptions should be doing what they can to increase the number of longitudinal studies despite their logistical challenges.

This project used a 6-wave U.S. longitudinal panel survey using the Prolific online panel to test how views and behavior regarding personal and collective solutions to what became an emerging pandemic (COVID-19) were affected by various beliefs and attitudes, between persons and within persons over time. This effort built upon both the Protective Action Decision Model (e.g., by including stages of behavior change measures; new measures of threat perception) and the researcher’s prior work (e.g., by generalizing temporal trends across far more measures) to assess how people respond to unexpected zoonoses (diseases that jump the species barrier) in a changing world, and why. By collecting data at roughly two-month intervals between February 2020 (when confirmed SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infections in the U.S. were < 50) and April 2021 (when many Americans had been vaccinated), this effort provided a dynamic picture of both changing and unchanging views and reported behaviors and policy support over 14 months.

Funding Sources: National Science Foundation (2411612)

Scope of Project

Geographic Coverage: United States

Collection Date(s): 3/2020 – 2/2025

Data Type(s): survey data

Methodology

Sampling: Convenience sample

Data Source: web-based self-completion surveys

Collection Mode(s): web-based survey

Unit(s) of Observation: individuals

Geographic Unit: United States

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Published Versions

V1 [2025-02-01]

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