RAPID: The Diffusion of Fear and Coronavirus: Tracking Individual Response Across Time and Space

Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences - The world is facing a pandemic owing to COVID-19. The economic and social disruption is just beginning, and many are fearful of the illness as well as effects on economic and social systems. Residents will continue to experience disruptions in their daily lives as more cases are detected in the coming weeks, in turn affecting their social and psychological wellbeing. This project will investigate the diffusion of fear and related mental and physical health behaviors across the United States amidst the crisis. This project examines how individuals? perceived risk and objective expressions of fear, including extreme social distancing, panic purchasing, and hoarding, are driven by demographic, physical and mental health, social connectivity, and media consumption characteristics. In addition, the project analyzes how community vulnerabilities, socioeconomic disadvantages, and geographic proximity to detected and disclosed coronavirus cases impact individual fear response behaviors simultaneously. Broadly, this project advances knowledge regarding how individuals respond to crises, personally and collectively, and benefits governmental leaders as well as citizens so they can better prepare resources to respond to future extreme events. Gathering indicators of well-being, along with assessing their impact provides valuable information to help organizations, governments, and policymakers better understand the personal, social and systemic ramifications of epidemiological disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only will the project illuminate how the victims of the pandemic are currently coping, but it also will provide information as to how social institutions are addressing the needs of these survivors ? thus, demonstrating the breadth and wealth of America?s social ties/resources, as well as their major deficiencies.


This project analyzes fear generated by the COVID-19 pandemic as a function of social and community characteristics. It will develop a random, representative post-stratified, weighted sample of the United States population using an on-line survey of approximately 10,000 individuals. The 15-20 minute self-administered interview utilizes validated survey instruments capturing multiple dimensions of subjective and objective fear, mental and physical health, media consumption, and communication behaviors related to fear responses. In addition, using multiple geo-location markers, the project pairs individuals? responses with existing aggregate databases, including those capturing the locations of confirmed COVID-19 cases, specific community-level disease vulnerability, and macro-level socioeconomic disadvantages to enable the use of well-established standard linear modeling, as well as hierarchical modeling techniques nesting individual respondents in their respective geographic communities. The project is an excellent candidate for RAPID funding because fear and anxiety become heightened as more cases are reported; thus, it is critical to interview respondents at the height of their concerns to reflect the growing social anxiety that is so widespread during these times. The study will provide a baseline for evaluating dynamic changes in fear responses and general well-being. It will also address key questions in social science regarding how fear and anxiety moves in and around dynamic social environments both temporally and spatially, thus informing sociological theories involving changes in social capital and the culture of fear.

This project is jointly funded by Sociology, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace.

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.