An official website of the United States government
Abstract To develop a new measure of preferred sources for risk information, two studies asked respondents to indicate what channels they were reliant on for information about COVID‐19, from 25 news channels ranging across the political spectrum. Unexpectedly, dependencies clustered around level of reliability rather than the political orientation of the news channel. In other words, each cluster included media channels from both the left and right side of the political spectrum, while dependencies clustered into sources that varied by the degree to which their content is reliable. Participants who turned to lower reliability channels indicated lower risk perceptions, less accurate probability estimations, reduced vaccination intentions, and lower protective behavioral intentions. Those inclined to use higher reliability channels indicated higher risk perceptions, more accurate probability estimations, increased vaccination intentions, and higher protective behavioral intentions. These relationships are discussed in terms of implications for our understanding of source reliance and risk perception, information sufficiency, and implications for both future research and public health interventions.
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Americans’ early behavioral responses to COVID-19
Understanding human responses to pandemics can improve public health. A survey of US residents (n = 2004) February 28, 2020, very early in the coronavirus pandemic, tested predictors of five “protective” actions: washing hands, wearing masks, avoiding travel, avoiding large public gatherings, and avoiding Asians (given COVID-19’s first appearance in China). We added to the Protective Action Decision Model—positing threat, protective action, and stakeholder perceptions as immediate predictors of intentions—objective and subjective coronavirus knowledge as predictors of these perceptions, and psychological distance to predict threat perceptions. We presumed objective and subjective knowledge were affected by following US and China news about COVID-19. Structural equation modeling indicated adequate fit for this parsimonious model; variance explained in behavioral intentions ranged from .12 (handwashing) to .33 (Asians). Behavioral intentions rose with higher threat, action, and stakeholder (trust) perceptions, psychological distance reduced threat perceptions, objective knowledge reduced threat and action perceptions but increased trust, and subjective knowledge did the opposite. Coronavirus-news following increased both objective and subjective knowledge, but subjective knowledge exhibited stronger associations and US news dominated China news. Moderate model fit and variance explained might reflect model parsimony and/or data collection when US cases were in the low double digits.
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- PAR ID:
- 10215746
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: An International Journal
- ISSN:
- 1080-7039
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/10807039.2021.1884842
