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

有效管理COVID-19需要公众遵守依赖于行为改变的指令。这项研究将调查不同群体的个人如何理解，处理和应对COVID-19带来的风险和不确定性，无论是在个人层面还是在集体层面。 报告审查了关于这一流行病的复杂、往往相互矛盾和充满感情的传播对社会变化的影响。 在对未来的担忧中，将特别关注大流行病预测进程中预期变化的影响。在这种情况下，人们如何修改他们的生活计划或表现出弹性？工作结果将直接传达给卫生专家，以确保这些见解与当前和随后的大流行病浪潮相关。这项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。这项研究通过增加大流行期间来自不同人群的大规模数据，增强了社会变化的过程模型。这一理论假设了一系列的变化，包括一个崩溃的时期，然后是一个过渡时期，通过人际关系进行导航，并最终建立新的社会秩序和结构。利用媒体分析，以及反复的民族志观察和采访，研究人员将收集数据，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，以及这种变化最终如何驱动影响疾病传播的行为（例如，戴口罩，观察社交距离）。这项工作提供了一个新的测试，在社区显示不同程度的承诺，集体主义意识形态和社会秩序的这一序列。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。

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.