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

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.

<br><br>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 &lt; 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.