Relationship between perceived risk and compliance with infection control measures during the first year of a pandemic

TL;DR

This study explores how people's perception of risk affects their compliance with infection control measures during the first year of the pandemic in Norway.

Contribution

The study reveals that perceived risk and compliance with infection control measures have a negligible and stable relationship over time.

Findings

There was a cross-sectional association between perceived risk and compliance at one time point.

No temporal associations were found between perceived risk and compliance across subsequent time points.

The relationship between perceived risk and compliance was robust to different operationalizations.

Abstract

The way people perceive health risks is often assumed to influence how they adopt precautionary measures. However, people’s assessment of a given phenomenon’s risk may vary over time, and the relationship between perceived risk and compliance with protective measures may be dynamic and bi-directional. We measured the perceived risk of COVID-19 and compliance with infection control measures for a large representative sample at four time-points during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway. We employed a cross-lagged panel analysis to investigate both the cross-sectional and the temporal association between perceived risk and compliance. We found cross-sectional associations between perceived risk and compliance at one of the time points. There were no temporal associations between risk at one time-point and compliance at the subsequent time-point. Neither was compliance associated with risk at the subsequent time-point. The results suggest that the relationship between perceived risk and compliance with COVID-19 infection control measures is negligible and stable over time. A multiverse analysis showed that the absence of a relationship between perceived risk and compliance was robust to different operationalizations of perceived risk. This highlights the need for a nuanced understanding of how risk perceptions impact behavior during a pandemic.

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