# 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.

## Key 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.