RAPID: A Multinational Analysis of Factors that Determine the Effectiveness of COVID-19 Warning Messages

The Covid-19 pandemic, which emerged in late 2019, swept the globe in early 2020 causing significant problems for national health, prosperity, and welfare across many nations. Official information sources had to balance the need to provide timely information to dispel rumors against the need for accuracy. This became increasingly problematic as increasing numbers of staff became unable to work. As a consequence, unexpected and often unhelpful perceptions of risk sometimes emerged in communities. These reduced trust and confidence in public servants, first-responders, the medical and scientific communities, and each other. This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) study aims to determine the stimuli that influence community understanding (norms) associated with the Covid-19 pandemic as well as attitudes towards key stakeholders and protective actions. By comparing China, which was amongst the most stringently locked-down countries, and South Korea, which issued restrictions and guidance, rather than formally locking-down, the researchers will be able to identify the stimuli that influence community risk perception and attitudinal development. The findings will have implications for how to shape disaster-related policies to be more effective. The research will also have implications for communications that better support public confidence, trust in, and compliance with key public servants such as local first responders and emergency management, and the medical and scientific communities.

The research design is based on the observation that, in hazardous situations, unexpected risk perceptions sometimes emerge due to conflict between observed social cues and official information. On the other hand, ?emergent norms? sometimes act as relationship moderators, balancing the conflicts between community risk perception, official information, and trust in public servants. This project introduces social-norm related moderators into an established theoretical framework - the Protective Action Decision Model: PADM ? in an effort to better predict protective behaviors in the context of public policies and messages. A mixed-methods approach -- relying upon both qualitative content analysis and multivariate statistical analysis of structured survey responses -- will be used test the posited moderator effects. The mixed-methods approach will limit the influence of spurious causal relationships by ensuring the analytic results are examined in relationship to rich, textual accounts provided by individuals experiencing quarantine. The two countries in the sample frame (China and South Korea) undertook a range of policy variants, which will be incorporated into the survey data set for analytic comparison and policy-relevant findings. This team will conduct surveys based upon the Protective Action Decision Model, which describes how environmental context and psychological processes together predict an individual's tendency to protect against or mitigate for risks. Specifically, the project will yield fundamental understanding about how official and unofficial messages interact to affect peoples' protective behaviors, which will have implications for how decision makers can craft more effective messages and public policies to help keep communities safer.

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.