RAPID: Understanding the Process of Social Change through the Transitional Period of the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19的有效管理需要公众遵守以行为改变为基础的指令。本研究将调查不同群体的个人如何在个人和集体层面上理解、处理和应对COVID-19带来的风险和不确定性。报告探讨了关于疫情的复杂、往往相互矛盾和充满情绪的传播如何影响社会变革。在对未来的关切中，将特别注意对大流行病的预计进程所预见的变化所产生的影响。在这种情况下，人们如何调整他们的生活计划或表现出适应力？这项工作的结果将直接传达给卫生专家，以确保见解与当前和今后的大流行浪潮相关。本研究将为一名研究生和一名本科生提供社会流行病学研究方面的培训。这项研究通过在大流行期间增加来自不同人群的大规模数据，增强了社会变革的过程模型。这一理论假设了一系列的变化，包括一段崩溃期，随后是一个过渡时期，这个过渡时期是通过人际关系来引导的，最后是新的社会秩序和结构的建立。通过媒体分析和反复的民族志观察和访谈，研究人员将收集数据，以解决知识消费、情感状态和意识形态的个体差异如何影响社会变革的时间和顺序要素，以及这种差异最终如何驱动影响疾病传播的行为（例如，戴口罩，观察社会距离）。这项工作为这个序列提供了一个新的测试，在社区中显示出对集体主义意识形态和社会秩序的不同程度的承诺。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。

Effective management of COVID-19 requires public adherence to directives reliant on behavior change. This research will investigate how diverse groups of individuals understand, process, and react to risk and uncertainty posed by COVID-19, at both a personal and a collective level. It examines how social changes are impacted by the complex, often contradictory and emotion-laden communications about the pandemic. Special attention will be given to impacts of a perceived change in the projected course of the pandemic amidst concern about the future. Under these conditions, how do people modify their life projects or demonstrate resiliency? Results from the work will be communicated directly to health experts to ensure that insights will be relevant to current and subsequent waves of the pandemic. The research will provide training for a graduate and an undergraduate student in social epidemiological research. This research augments processual models of social change through the addition of large-scale data from a diverse population during the pandemic. This theory posits a sequence of changes involving a period of break-down, followed by a transitional period that is navigated through human relationships, and culminating with the establishment of new social orders and structures. Using media analysis, and repeated waves of ethnographic observation and interviewing, the researchers will collect data that address how individual variation in the consumption of knowledge, affective states, and ideologies affect the timing and sequential elements of social change, and how such variation ultimately drives the behaviors that affect disease transmission (e.g., wearing masks, observing social distancing). The work provides a novel test of this sequence in communities displaying varying levels of commitment to collectivist ideologies and social order.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.