Nationwide Survey Summer 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to examine risk perceptions and responses on both a national and regional scale. When faced with a major health crisis, individuals are likely to be motivated to seek information in order to alleviate anxiety and gather information about how to protect themselves. While these dependencies are well documented, less is known about the extent to which media dependency translates into desired behavior, and the extent to which other effects associated with these dependencies may help or hinder this translation. Particularly troubling is prior research supporting the notion that depressive symptomology may lead to inaction, and that reliance on different news sources may lead to variability in the perception of risk. In partnership with Qualtrics panel services, data was collected from a nationally representative sample of 5,000 respondents to assess the key variables of interest. Participants were asked about the relative importance of varying news outlets, sources of first alerts, time spent seeking information, risk perception (including magnitude and probability), specific protective behaviors advocated by the CDC, and depressive symptomology. They were also evaluated in terms of rumination tendency and need for cognition. The aim is to extend previous research by investigating the extent to which risk perception and motivation to take protective action are tied to specific source preferences, and the degree to which individual processing characteristics and related responses influence these relationships.