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

2019冠状病毒病大流行提供了一个独特的机会，可以在国家和区域范围内审查风险认知和应对措施。当面临重大健康危机时，个人可能会有动机去寻求信息，以减轻焦虑，并收集有关如何保护自己的信息。虽然这些依赖关系有很好的文档记录，但媒体依赖在多大程度上转化为期望的行为，以及与这些依赖关系相关的其他影响在多大程度上有助于或阻碍这种转化，我们知之甚少。尤其令人不安的是，先前的研究支持这样一种观点，即抑郁症状可能导致不作为，对不同新闻来源的依赖可能导致风险感知的变化。目前的研究扩展了先前的研究，调查了风险感知和采取保护行动的动机与特定来源偏好的联系程度，以及个人处理特征和相关反应对这些关系的影响程度。该研究还旨在调查抑郁症症状学可能导致在这种情况下不作为的论点。此外，研究小组探索了在威胁迫在眉睫时的具体保护行动和对风险的感知，而不是依赖回忆。研究结果通过评估特质加工、来源偏好、抑郁症状学和保护行为之间的联系，填补了社会科学文献中关于应急反应的重大空白，从而为我们的知识库做出了贡献。这些新知识有助于应急管理人员进行消息设计和放置。一项在线调查收集了5000名全国代表性受访者的数据，以评估感兴趣的关键变量。参与者被问及不同新闻媒体的相对重要性、首次警报的来源、寻找信息所花费的时间、风险感知（包括大小和概率）、疾病控制中心倡导的特定保护行为和抑郁症状学。问题还包括情绪健康、参与收集信息的程度、对认知的特征需求和反刍应对倾向。先前关于反刍在信息寻找中的作用的研究结果被重新审视以进行复制，并扩展到研究这种处理方式在抑郁症状学和保护行为（如社交距离）中的后续作用。使用探索性因素分析将源偏好简化为集群，并根据特定源偏好集群对风险感知和保护行动的影响进行了检查。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 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.