Health Cognitions and Perceptions related to COVID-19
Creators: name: Fitzsimmons, Charles
name: Thompson, Clarissa
name: Taber, Jennifer
name: Mielicki, Marta
name: Coifman, Karin
name: Sidney, Pooja
name: Matthews, Percival
name: Scheibe, Daniel
name: Schiller, Lauren
name: Waters, Erika
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Education
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: COVID-19
subject: fractions
subject: numeracy
subject: visual models

description: January 2021 Qualtrics Panel and Psychology Subject Pool Experiments Participants In mid- to late January 2021, our research team will partner with Qualtrics to launch a data collection with adults across the U.S. As with our March 2020 data collection, we will include quotas for gender, age, and educational attainment. The design of the study will be the same as our March 2020 study: half of participants will be randomly assigned to the experimental education condition and half to the business-as-usual control condition. Qualtrics “Quality Completes” and Exclusion Criteria We aim to collect data from 2,000 quality completes. Quality completes will be operationalized as those who successfully pass 2 out of 3 attention checks embedded in our survey. Additionally, we have included one other attention check that requires participants to type in the word “blue” and not answer a question about COVID-19. After all data is collected, we will exclude people who fail to answer this question correctly after we implement all other previously pre-registered exclusion criteria for our earlier data collection efforts on Qualtrics and with college students. Experimental Design and Stimuli Updates Updates to the experimental education condition include number lines to visualize the “orchard” example and the COVID-19 vs. flu example. We have included additional transfer problems that were selected from the correlational study that was conducted in Fall 2020 in the KSU and UK subject pool. In order to assess pretest-to-posttest change in the Disease A vs. Disease B problem, we have added the very same problem (with no visual model) as the first transfer problem after the COVID-19 vs. flu health-related math problem that participants complete post-intervention. To ensure that our baseline survey could be completed within 40 minutes, it was necessary to take out some measures (e.g., Need for Cognition), and minimize others (e.g., include only two of four subscales from the MAQ). In order to more easily assess relative confidence accuracy, we have added a question in which participants will indicate whether they believe they got the health-related math problem right or wrong. We made wording updates to the risk perception, worry, and severity questions that will be presented in the baseline as well as daily diary surveys. We added a new disgust scale to the baseline survey as well. Updates to Daily Diaries As with the March 2020 study, participants who are considered quality completes will be invited to complete 10 days of daily diaries. We have added a transfer question to Day 1 of the daily diaries in which we ask participants about the November 2020 COVID-19 case-fatality rate. Participants will receive $5 for completing the daily diaries. Anticipated Analyses We will conduct analyses consistent with those that were conducted for our under-review manuscript involving the March 2020 data collection (preprint here: https://psyarxiv.com/hukyv/). Specifically, we found that males/females were not actually randomly distributed across our conditions, thus we included gender as a covariate in Model 1 along with condition. Then, we added additional covariates (e.g., PAE, math anxiety, etc.) into Model 2. Of course, if males/females are equally distributed across the two conditions in our currently-proposed studies, gender will not be necessary to add as a covariate in Model 1. There is a distinct possibility that reviewers of our under-review manuscript will request additional analyses. Given the similarities of the January 2021 data collection with the March 2020 data collection, we will analyze the data similarly. As indicated in the Fall 2020 correlational pre-registration, we will analyze each health-related math problem separately and may aggregate accuracy across all transfer problems assuming an adequate level of reliability across the items. Participant Recruitment for Replication with Undergraduates We will conduct a replication of the January 2021 Qualtrics panel study with undergraduates from KSU, UK, and UW-Madison. Because psychology subject pools generally include fewer students in the Spring semester, we will plan to recruit as many students as possible before the end of the semester at each respective university. We estimate that there will be approximately 2,000 students in the KSU subject pool; the UK subject pool will allow us to collect data from approximately 250 students. There will be no follow-up daily diaries administered to the subject pool students. However, all other aspects of the experimental design and analysis plan will be the same as the Qualtrics panel study mentioned here Full Baseline Survey and Daily Diary Survey We have included exports of our surveys. We did not begin collecting data until we pre-registered these changes.