RAPID: Examining Media Dependencies, Risk Perceptions, and Depressive Symptomatology during the 2020 COVID Pandemic

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. The current study extends 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. The research also aims to investigate the argument that depressive symptomatology may lead to inaction under such circumstances. Further, the research team explores specific protective actions and perceptions of risk while the threat is imminent, as opposed to relying on recall. The findings contribute to our knowledge base by filling a significant gap in the social science literature on emergency response by evaluating the links between trait processing, source preferences, depressive symptomatology, and protective actions. The new knowledge is beneficial to emergency managers for message design and placement.

An online survey gathers data from a nationally representative sample of 5,000 respondents to assess the key variables of interest. Participants are 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 Center for Disease Control, and depressive symptomatology. Questions also measure emotional well-being, level of involvement in the information gathered, trait need for cognition, and ruminative coping tendencies. Prior findings concerning the role of rumination in information seeking are reexamined for replication and extended to investigate the subsequent role of this processing style in both depressive symptomatology and protective actions, such as social distancing. Source preferences are reduced into clusters using Exploratory Factor Analysis and examined in terms of the impact of specific source preference clusters on risk perception and protective action.

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.