Americans’ Views of Voluntary Protective Actions Against Zika Infection: Conceptual and Measurement Issues

Abstract

Understanding factors affecting decisions by people to protect themselves, or not, is critical to designing supportive communications. Here, threat, protective-action, and stakeholder perceptions were evaluated for effects on mainland Americans' behavioral intentions regarding Zika in April 2017, as postulated by the Protective Action Decision Model. Although all three perception types (including a novel resource sufficiency measure) affected intentions, these relationships varied widely depending upon the method used to measure adoption of actions (e.g., total count of all behaviors adopted vs. behavior-specific analyses), the behaviors involved, and whether analysis focused on the full sample or only on people who had a reasonable opportunity to enact the behavior or who believed it relevant to their lives. There was a general contrast between mosquito control actions (removal of mosquito breeding areas and pesticide spraying) and travel-related behaviors (avoiding travel to areas of local transmission of the virus, protecting oneself from mosquito bites after potential exposure, and practicing safe sex after potential exposure). Reported action or inaction during the 2016 mosquito season, and stages of behavior change, were both elicited in January-February 2017; both drove intentions in April 2017 for the upcoming season, although direct and indirect effects varied widely. Collectively these findings present theoretical, measurement, and practical implications for understanding, tracking, and promoting voluntary protective actions against hazards. conceptual issues involving a decision model originally developed for earthquakes and hurricanes, and whether its predictors differ across previous stages of behavioral change, and (2) measurement issues involving behavior or behavioral intentions, behavioral facilitation or impedance, and self-reported behavior relevance. BACKGROUND Concepts in Protective Behavior and Study HypothesesThe Protective Action Decision Model (PADM) was developed for probing the role of information in 2694

The Evolving Field of Risk Communication

“…Other behavioral outcomes that factored frequently in risk communication research were audience's willingness to take protective actions and seek risk information. Among prominent theoretical frameworks, the Protective Action Decision Model (Lindell & Perry, 2012), originally posited to predict behavioral intentions in the face of "natural" disasters, such as hurricanes (Rickard et al, 2017b), wildfires (McCaffrey, Wilson, & Konar, 2018), and tornadoes (Miran, Ling, Gerard, & Rothfusz, 2019), was also used to examine infectious diseases (Johnson, 2019) and chemical spills (Heath, Lee, Palenchar, & Lemon, 2018). Efforts to understand information seeking behaviors frequently built on the Risk Information Seeking and Processing model (Yang, Aloe, & Feeley, 2014), which integrates messenger, message, and audience characteristics to predict information seeking behaviors.…”

Trust, confidence, familiarity, and support for land‐based recirculating aquaculture facilities

“…As for other implications, although we emphasized the aggregate measure of cooperation for brevity, and because by definition its scale yielded the best‐fitting path analysis, we agree that individual behaviors are also informative (Johnson, 2019a). The vote measure, for example, fit less well than models using other individual measures of cooperation while yielding the strongest regression weight for direct effects of trust; by contrast, the benefit‐risk measure's effect varies little across cooperation types.…”

Cross-temporal relations of conditional risk perception measures with protective actions against COVID-19

“…Risk perception-behavior associations were largely similar across protective behaviors (H4), with avoiding travel and mask-wearing as outliers. Generalization is unwarranted pending more separate analysis of each behavior, as Johnson (2019a) found regarding Zika protective actions that the common practice in natural hazards research of using a count of the number of actions taken as one's dependent variable obscured sometimes large inter-behavior differences. “Avoiding travel” to infected areas may reflect what Johnson (2019b) called symbolic hazard avoidance: it is easy to deny travel intentions if you never intended going there anyway, and this action exhibited the weakest, and fewest statistically significant, associations in our perception-behavior hypothesis-testing.…”