Daan Liang
$47,972
Lauren Clay
Amber Silver
SUNY at Albany
New York
Engineering (ENG)
This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant will survey adults in the states of New York, Louisiana, and Washington about their risk perceptions, information preferences, and the actions they are (and are not) taking to protect themselves from the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to capture any changes in these patterns for each state over time, the survey will be conducted every month for six months. These changes become even more critical as states move to reduce restrictions on people’s movements and the looming probability of a second wave of COVID-19 later this year. This study will improve the research and health community’s understanding of how people perceive risks, particularly when the threat itself is not visible. This study will also provide critical insights into behavioral influences on health during a pandemic in fulfillment of NSF’s mission to advance national health, prosperity, and welfare. Looking at risk perceptions, preferences, information sources, and protective actions at multiple points in time is important as the scale and severity of this pandemic have evolved rapidly, as have state-level responses to those changes. This study offering a unique lens into the evolving nature of pandemics, pandemic responses, and potential resurgences of pandemics that can be applied to the ongoing COVID-19 response and other disasters that evolve over time. In the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, capturing these monthly changes at the state-level will help emergency managers, health care practitioners, government officials, and other parties involved with the pandemic response that must adapt their responses to these dynamic conditions as the pandemic continues to unfold. These insights also contribute to NSF’s mission to secure the national defense by providing necessary knowledge to stave off unintended consequences attending future infectious diseases in the United States. By involving undergraduate students as research assistants on the project, and by integrating findings into classroom instruction and making the data available for thesis and dissertation research, this study will also support the education of the next generation of emergency management and public health practitioners. COVID-19 provides the opportunity to examine how people obtain, interpret, and respond to health risk information regarding a significant, widespread infectious disease event. Grounded in the Protective Action Decision Model (PADM) introduced by Lindell and Perry (2012), this project explores how people utilize health risk information and other social and environmental cues to shape their understanding of significant health risks posed by COVID-19. This study aims to characterize how people use health risk information and other cues from the social and built environment to make decisions about protective action given the lack of visible cues associated with the virus itself. The study will model patterns of risk perception and protective action over time, space, and place due to changes in health risk, public health response, and community restrictions. Adopting a multi-wave cross-sectional design, the research team will survey samples of 500 individuals in New York, Washington, and Louisiana for a total of 1,500 participants in each wave of the study. Six waves of data collection will be completed at monthly intervals in order to capture changing risk perceptions and behavioral responses as the pandemic and pandemic response continue to evolve. The research is extended using PADM by identifying: (1) what cues people use to make decisions when there are no visible environmental cues, and (2) by examining changes over time as a novel event unfolds. In addition to the contribution to basic science, study results have implications for practice both during the COVID-19 pandemic and in response to future disasters. The research team will communicate findings to practitioners though a variety of sources including the student-led, faculty supervised Virtual Operations Support Team (VOST) at the University at Albany to facilitate information dissemination to the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services (DHSES). Findings will be further disseminated at scientific meetings, in peer-reviewed academic journals, and in practitioner fora, as well as incorporated into course content and made available for theses and dissertations. Finally, data will be published in the DesignSafe-CI repository upon completion of primary analyses.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.