Introduction
This document visualizes results of the international survey by Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication about people’s attitudes towards the risk of coronavirus, and their governments’ reactions. For details see article published in the Journal of Risk Research on 05 May 2020 (Dryhurst et al. 2020).
Data were collected during March and April 2020.
Percieved effects from COVID-19
Percieved risk of COVID-19
Worry about COVID-19
Worry about COVID-19 compared to other issues
Risk perception of COVID-19 compared to other issues - direct and personal effects
Risk perception of COVID-19 compared to other issues - effects on friends and family
View on vaccination for COVID-19
Information about COVID-19
Trust in information about COVID-19
View on scientific knowledge about COVID-19
View on govermental responses
Trust in individuals and society
View on individuals and society
Experiences of COVID-19 or similar diseases
Risk perception index
As shown in (Dryhurst et al. 2020), risk perception can be aggregated into an index, which combines answers to the following questions
| Question | Choices |
|---|---|
How much do you agree or disagree with the following statements? |
strongly disagree(1)..strongly agree(5) |
How much do you agree or disagree with the following statements? |
strongly disagree(1)..strongly agree(5) |
How much do you agree or disagree with the following statements? |
strongly disagree(1)..strongly agree(5) |
How worried are you personally about the following issues at present? |
not at all worried(1)..very worried(7) |
How likely do you think it is that your friends and family in the country you are currently living in will be directly affected by the following in the next 6 months? |
not at all likely(1)..very likely(7) |
How likely do you think it is that you will be directly and personally affected by the following in the next 6 months? |
not at all likely(1)..very likely(7) |
Rescaling of questions on 1..5 scale is done with \(NewScore = OldScore * 1.5 - 0.5\). One of the question is stated with negation (i.e. “will NOT affect”), so the answers need to be inverted. Once the scores are rescaled they can be averaged across the answers to the questions in the table above.
Now we can compare distribution of Risk index by country.
References
Dryhurst, Sarah, Claudia R. Schneider, John Kerr, Alexandra L. J. Freeman, Gabriel Recchia, Anne Marthe van der Bles, David Spiegelhalter, and Sander van der Linden. 2020. “Risk Perceptions of Covid-19 Around the World.” Journal of Risk Research 0 (0): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2020.1758193.