RAPID: A Multinational Analysis of Factors that Determine the Effectiveness of COVID-19 Warning Messages

2019年末出现的新冠肺炎疫情于2020年初席卷全球，给许多国家的国民健康、繁荣和福利带来了严重问题。官方信息来源必须权衡提供及时信息以消除谣言的需要和对准确性的需要。随着越来越多的工作人员无法工作，这变得越来越成问题。因此，社区中有时会出现意想不到的、往往是无益的风险观念。这降低了对公务员、急救人员、医疗和科学界以及彼此之间的信任和信心。这项快速反应研究(RAPID)研究旨在确定影响与新冠肺炎大流行相关的社区理解(规范)的刺激因素，以及对关键利益攸关方和保护行动的态度。通过比较最严格封锁的国家之一的中国和发布限制和指导而不是正式封锁的韩国，研究人员将能够识别影响社区风险认知和态度发展的刺激因素。这些发现将对如何制定更有效的灾害相关政策产生影响。这项研究还将对沟通产生影响，以更好地支持公众对关键公务员的信心、信任和遵守，如当地急救人员和应急管理人员，以及医疗和科学社区。研究设计基于这样的观察：在危险情况下，由于观察到的社会线索和官方信息之间的冲突，有时会出现意想不到的风险感知。另一方面，“紧急规范”有时充当关系调节器，平衡社区风险认知、官方信息和对公务员的信任之间的冲突。该项目将与社会规范相关的主持人引入一个既定的理论框架--保护行动决策模型：PADM，以努力更好地预测公共政策和信息背景下的保护性行为。将使用一种混合方法--依赖于结构化调查答复的定性内容分析和多元统计分析--来检验假定的主持人效应。混合方法将限制虚假因果关系的影响，方法是确保分析结果与经历隔离的个人提供的丰富文本描述相关联地进行检查。样本框架中的两个国家(中国和韩国)进行了一系列政策变式，这些变式将被纳入调查数据集，用于分析性比较和与政策相关的结论。该团队将根据保护性行动决策模型进行调查，该模型描述了环境背景和心理过程如何共同预测个人防范或缓解风险的倾向。具体地说，该项目将从根本上理解官方和非官方信息如何相互作用，影响人们的保护行为，这将对决策者如何制定更有效的信息和公共政策以帮助保护社区安全产生影响。该奖项反映了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。

The Covid-19 pandemic, which emerged in late 2019, swept the globe in early 2020 causing significant problems for national health, prosperity, and welfare across many nations. Official information sources had to balance the need to provide timely information to dispel rumors against the need for accuracy. This became increasingly problematic as increasing numbers of staff became unable to work. As a consequence, unexpected and often unhelpful perceptions of risk sometimes emerged in communities. These reduced trust and confidence in public servants, first-responders, the medical and scientific communities, and each other. This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) study aims to determine the stimuli that influence community understanding (norms) associated with the Covid-19 pandemic as well as attitudes towards key stakeholders and protective actions. By comparing China, which was amongst the most stringently locked-down countries, and South Korea, which issued restrictions and guidance, rather than formally locking-down, the researchers will be able to identify the stimuli that influence community risk perception and attitudinal development. The findings will have implications for how to shape disaster-related policies to be more effective. The research will also have implications for communications that better support public confidence, trust in, and compliance with key public servants such as local first responders and emergency management, and the medical and scientific communities.The research design is based on the observation that, in hazardous situations, unexpected risk perceptions sometimes emerge due to conflict between observed social cues and official information. On the other hand, “emergent norms” sometimes act as relationship moderators, balancing the conflicts between community risk perception, official information, and trust in public servants. This project introduces social-norm related moderators into an established theoretical framework - the Protective Action Decision Model: PADM – in an effort to better predict protective behaviors in the context of public policies and messages. A mixed-methods approach -- relying upon both qualitative content analysis and multivariate statistical analysis of structured survey responses -- will be used test the posited moderator effects. The mixed-methods approach will limit the influence of spurious causal relationships by ensuring the analytic results are examined in relationship to rich, textual accounts provided by individuals experiencing quarantine. The two countries in the sample frame (China and South Korea) undertook a range of policy variants, which will be incorporated into the survey data set for analytic comparison and policy-relevant findings. This team will conduct surveys based upon the Protective Action Decision Model, which describes how environmental context and psychological processes together predict an individual's tendency to protect against or mitigate for risks. Specifically, the project will yield fundamental understanding about how official and unofficial messages interact to affect peoples' protective behaviors, which will have implications for how decision makers can craft more effective messages and public policies to help keep communities safer.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.