RAPID: How uncertainty about risk and conflicting messages affect preventive behaviors against Covid-19

RAPID：风险的不确定性和相互矛盾的信息如何影响针对 Covid-19 的预防行为

• 批准号: 2027405
• 负责人: Julie Downs
• 金额: $ 19.97万
• 依托单位: Carnegie-Mellon University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-05-01 至 2022-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2027405&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RAPID; How; uncertainty; about; risk

The coronavirus outbreak poses a major challenge for our health system. As people become sick and need medical care, they need resources like hospital beds and ventilators. However, if many people become sick in a short period of time, there will not be enough of these resources to care for them all. If we are to treat every sick person with the best possible medical care, we need to both prevent and delay new infections. We know from history and medical science that public behavior is the most important tool for this prevention. But for the public to help, people need to know what to do and how to do it, as well as to understand why these behaviors are so important. People take their cues from those around them in making sense of new, uncertain situations. This makes it important to make sure that everybody is getting good information about the risks of Covid-19 and how to prevent it. Official messages need to reflect scientific knowledge, and myths that pop up in communities need to be addressed so that people can understand and debunk them. The research team has been studying how people are thinking about the risks of Covid-19, and what they are doing to protect themselves and their community. One key finding from that work is that when people are uncertain about the risk, they are more likely to rely on what other people are doing to determine what the right thing to do is. The team also finds that people's main concerns about social distancing are that they are worried about getting by without a paycheck and how they will get food and meet other urgent needs. This project involves surveys and experiments to better understand these concerns and provide new knowledge to help guide policy action. First, we need to know whether helping people understand how to prevent infection will actually lead them to protect themselves. The experiments test and identify how best to help people understand, especially for those who are not fully engaging in social distancing. Then, over the next few months as the situation changes, the research team develops messages to help people understand what is happening and how their behavior can help protect themselves and the people around them.In early March 2020, the researchers conducted an exploratory survey to determine whether some protective behaviors were reported at low levels and identify predictors of poor compliance. The research showed that compliance with the more extreme social distancing behaviors appear to be dependent on social norms, with rates being lower when other people do not seem to be engaging in such distancing. Furthermore, people appear to rely on those norms particularly when they experience more uncertainty about the risk. The findings also were that concerns about losing pay and disruption of personal plans are most predictive of anticipated failures to comply with orders to stay home, followed by the need to shop for food and other urgent needs. These findings suggest that a policy approach aimed at getting people through financial and logistical hardship is critically important and has the potential to be highly impactful. The new research explores more deeply these concerns and how they relate to protective actions. The first phase establishes which predictive factors have causal influence on protective behaviors. The second phase is an assessment of how well protective behaviors are being performed and identifies causally predictive factors identified in the first phase for a nationally representative sample (oversampling high-risk geographical locations). In the third phase, iteratively for each causal factor, the team develops and pilots messages in a test-bed environment, testing final messages with an experimental design in a national sample (repeating regularly as the environment and pandemic evolve), and following up on a subset of critical messages with a 3-day retest to assess behavior change. Finally, again iteratively for each effective message, the team disseminates recommended messages along with the rationale for why they are useful and how they are understood to work. The team shares its findings with its established network of public health officials.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.

冠状病毒的爆发对我们的卫生系统构成了重大挑战。当人们生病并需要医疗护理时，他们需要病床和呼吸机等资源。然而，如果许多人在短时间内生病，这些资源将不足以照顾他们所有人。如果我们要尽可能用最好的医疗服务来治疗每一个病人，我们就需要预防和推迟新的感染。我们从历史和医学中了解到，公众行为是预防这种疾病的最重要工具。但要想让公众提供帮助，人们需要知道该做什么和如何做，以及理解为什么这些行为如此重要。人们在理解新的、不确定的情况时，会从周围的人那里获得线索。这使得确保每个人都能获得有关新冠肺炎风险以及如何防范的信息变得非常重要。官方信息需要反映科学知识，社区中出现的神话需要得到解决，这样人们才能理解和揭穿它们。该研究小组一直在研究人们是如何看待新冠肺炎的风险的，以及他们正在做些什么来保护自己和他们的社区。这项工作的一个关键发现是，当人们对风险不确定时，他们更有可能依赖其他人的所作所为来确定应该做什么。研究小组还发现，人们对社交距离的主要担忧是，他们担心在没有工资的情况下生活不下去，以及他们如何获得食物和满足其他紧急需求。这个项目包括调查和实验，以更好地了解这些关切，并提供新的知识来帮助指导政策行动。首先，我们需要知道，帮助人们了解如何预防感染是否真的会导致他们保护自己。这些实验测试并确定了如何最好地帮助人们理解，特别是对于那些没有完全参与社交距离的人。然后，在接下来的几个月里，随着情况的变化，研究团队开发了一些信息，以帮助人们了解正在发生的事情，以及他们的行为如何有助于保护自己和周围的人。2020年3月初，研究人员进行了一项探索性调查，以确定一些保护性行为是否报告水平较低，并确定遵从性差的预测因素。研究表明，对更极端的社交疏远行为的遵守似乎依赖于社会规范，当其他人似乎不参与这种疏远时，遵从率会更低。此外，人们似乎依赖这些规范，特别是当他们经历更多关于风险的不确定性时。研究结果还表明，对失去工资和打乱个人计划的担忧，最能预示着人们预计不会遵守留在家里的命令，其次是需要去商店购买食物和其他紧急需求。这些发现表明，旨在帮助人们度过财务和后勤困难的政策方法至关重要，并有可能产生极大的影响。这项新的研究更深入地探讨了这些担忧以及它们与保护行动的关系。第一阶段确定哪些预测因素对保护行为有因果影响。第二阶段是对保护行为的执行情况进行评估，并确定第一阶段中为具有全国代表性的样本(对高危地理位置进行过抽样)确定的因果预测因素。在第三阶段，针对每个因果因素，团队在试验台环境中反复开发和引导报文，在全国样本中用实验设计测试最终报文(随着环境和流行病的演变定期重复)，并通过3天的重新测试跟踪关键报文的子集，以评估行为变化。最后，对于每个有效的消息，团队再一次迭代地传播推荐的消息，以及它们为什么有用以及如何理解它们的工作原理。该团队与其建立的公共卫生官员网络分享了他们的发现。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。