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

2019年底出现的新冠肺炎大流行于2020年初席卷全球，给许多国家的国民健康、繁荣和福利带来了重大问题。官方消息来源必须在提供及时信息以消除谣言的需要与准确性的需要之间取得平衡。由于越来越多的工作人员无法工作，这变得越来越成问题。因此，有时会在社区中出现意想不到的、往往是无益的风险观念。这降低了人们对公务员、急救人员、医学界和科学界以及彼此之间的信任和信心。本快速反应研究（Rapid）旨在确定影响与Covid-19大流行相关的社区理解（规范）的刺激因素，以及对主要利益攸关方和保护行动的态度。通过比较中国和韩国，中国是最严格的封锁国家之一，韩国发布了限制和指导，而不是正式的封锁，研究人员将能够确定影响社区风险感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。这项研究还将对更好地支持公众信心、信任和遵守关键公务员（如当地第一响应者和应急管理人员）以及医学界和科学界的沟通产生影响。研究设计是基于这样的观察：在危险的情况下，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”有时充当关系调节者，平衡社区风险感知、官方信息和对公务员信任之间的冲突。本项目将与社会规范相关的调节因子引入已建立的理论框架——保护行动决策模型：PADM——以更好地预测公共政策和信息背景下的保护行为。混合方法方法——依赖于定性内容分析和结构化调查反应的多元统计分析——将用于测试假设的调节效应。混合方法方法将限制虚假因果关系的影响，确保分析结果与经历隔离的个人提供的丰富的文本叙述相关联。样本框架中的两个国家（中国和韩国）采取了一系列政策变化，这些变化将被纳入调查数据集，用于分析比较和与政策相关的发现。该团队将根据保护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减轻风险的倾向。具体来说，该项目将对官方和非官方信息如何相互作用影响人们的保护行为产生基本理解，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持社区安全产生影响。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, 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.