COVID-19: Understanding a Global Pandemic

For SCR Director Dr. Ellen Peters, the ongoing global pandemic presented a rare opportunity to study public risk perception and risk-related behavior in the midst of an ongoing public health emergency.

Through her National Science Foundation–funded research, Dr. Peters is studying how people perceive and react to this crisis, what information they attend to, who they trust (or do not trust), and how this crisis affects their future plans, choices of preventive and treatment options, and support for policy options.

 

How Perceptions of Risk Change Over Time

A major challenge of risk perception research has been the difficulty of examining how people’s attitudes and behavior in real-time emergencies change over time. The public’s perceptions and risk-related behaviors seem likely to change over time in response to media coverage as well as actions from the United States and foreign governments.

Through her research, Dr. Peters addresses these challenges by tracking a panel of respondents during the pandemic crisis over a period of months to measure their emotional responses to the pandemic, risk perceptions, and risk-related decisions and behaviors, including support for policies.

She has found, for example, that fear about the virus increased from mid-February to the end of March, but it started to reduce in May.

 

Learn More

With the continued relevance of this work, Dr. Peters’s research has been widely reported in media outlets.

She has written for the Sunday edition of the New York Times as well as The Conversation.

She has been interviewed on television in Portland and the Middle East, and she appeared on radio shows such as OPB’s Think Out Loud, National Public Radio, and the Chip Franklin Show.

Her work has also been covered extensively by AroundTheO, the Daily Emerald, Eugene Weekly, Science, Discover, Muhlenberg College, KTVZ News, and Market Watch.