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

新冠肺炎疫情正使世界面临大流行。经济和社会混乱才刚刚开始，许多人担心这种疾病以及对经济和社会制度的影响。随着未来几周发现更多病例，居民的日常生活将继续受到干扰，进而影响他们的社会和心理健康。这个项目将调查危机中美国恐惧的扩散和相关的心理和身体健康行为。本项目研究了个人的感知风险和恐惧的客观表达，包括极端的社会距离、恐慌性购买和囤积，是如何受到人口、身心健康、社会联系和媒体消费特征的驱动的。此外，该项目还分析了社区脆弱性、社会经济劣势以及与发现和披露的冠状病毒病例的地理邻近性如何同时影响个人的恐惧反应行为。总的来说，该项目提高了个人和集体如何应对危机的知识，并使政府领导人和公民受益，使他们能够更好地准备资源来应对未来的极端事件。收集福祉指标并评估其影响，可提供有价值的信息，帮助组织、政府和政策制定者更好地了解COVID-19大流行等流行病学灾害对个人、社会和系统的影响。该项目不仅将阐明大流行病的受害者目前是如何应对的，而且还将提供有关社会机构如何满足这些幸存者需求的信息——从而展示美国社会关系/资源的广度和丰富性，以及它们的主要缺陷。该项目分析了COVID-19大流行产生的恐惧作为社会和社区特征的功能。它将通过对大约1万人的在线调查，对美国人口进行随机、有代表性的分层后加权抽样。15-20分钟的自我管理访谈采用了有效的调查工具，捕获了与恐惧反应相关的主观和客观恐惧、心理和身体健康、媒体消费和沟通行为的多个维度。此外，该项目使用多个地理位置标记，将个人的回答与现有的汇总数据库配对，包括捕获COVID-19确诊病例位置、特定社区层面疾病易感性和宏观层面社会经济劣势的数据库，以便使用完善的标准线性建模，以及分层建模技术，将个人受访者嵌套在各自的地理社区中。该项目是快速供资的绝佳候选项目，因为随着报告的病例越来越多，恐惧和焦虑会加剧；因此，在受访者关注的高度采访他们，以反映在这些时期如此普遍的日益增长的社会焦虑是至关重要的。这项研究将为评估恐惧反应和总体幸福感的动态变化提供基线。它还将解决社会科学中关于恐惧和焦虑如何在时间和空间上进入和围绕动态社会环境的关键问题，从而为涉及社会资本和恐惧文化变化的社会学理论提供信息。该项目由社会学、促进竞争研究的既定计划（EPSCoR）和安全可靠的网络空间共同资助。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.