DOI: 10.17603/ds2-2wtr-4h82
title: Tornado/COVID-19 Risk Perception and Intended Behavior Survey
title: in Tornado Risk Perceptions and Sheltering Options during the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020

description: The COVID-19 pandemic grew rapidly in many portions of the United States during March and April of 2020, coinciding with the seasonal increased risk of tornadoes in the central and eastern United States. This created a situation in which some recommended protective behaviors for tornadoes were in conflict with recommended COVID-19 protective actions. This was particularly challenging for any household who planned to seek shelter from tornado threats at a location other than home, such as a public shelter or a home of a family member or friend. Our research goal—given the ongoing pandemic—was to understand risk perception and intended sheltering behaviors among residents of tornado-prone states and analyze whether these views changed from the spring to the late summer of 2020. We collected approximately 3000 surveys in late May and then again in late July and early August across more than twenty states. We intentionally oversampled households living in mobile or manufactured homes to capture the perceptions of people living in more vulnerable housing units. In this research, we present several findings including changes in COVID-19 and tornado risk perception and sheltering intentions from May to August, and influences on perception and intended behaviors related to different housing types, NWS regions, urban and rural settings, political affiliations, and household demographics.
description: This survey was developed by the authors during the early stages of the initial spread of COVID-19 throughout the United States during March and April of 2020. The research required data collection via an online questionnaire administered through Qualtrics. There were two primary reasons driving the choice of online data collection. First, this research built upon a prior project funded by the NOAA VORTEX-Southeast program. For the sake of consistency, we employed the newly proposed questionnaire using the same company for recruitment and including several questionnaire items from our previous 2018 instrument. This entailed recruitment via Qualtrics of about 3000 participants distributed geographically across states in the central and eastern United States during May and then again in July & August of 2020. Our goal was to recruit a demographically and geographically diverse sample of residents in the study area according to gender, age, race, and/or ethnicity. The second reason for choosing an online mode of data collection was to abide by limitations on travel and social interaction due to the COVID-19 pandemic that were in place during 2020. The third reason was to be able to quickly deploy the survey instrument twice to investigate how risk perceptions and potential behaviors changed as both the COVID-19 pandemic and tornado season evolved.

The online questionnaire included approximately 60 items grouped by theme into four sections. The first section included questions related to tornado risk perception, beliefs about the wind resistance and safety of respondents’ homes, and tornado sheltering behavior within the previous two years. The questions were based on previously published research on risk perception to tornadoes and hurricanes (Trumbo et al., 2016; Demuth 2018; Ash et al., 2020). The second section included questions to gauge respondents’ perceived vulnerability to infectious diseases, their general aversion to germs, and their risk perceptions of COVID-19. The first two subsections were based upon prior work on perceived vulnerability to infectious diseases (Duncan, Schaller, and Park, 2009). The subsection specific to COVID-19 risk perception used items adapted from the tornado risk perception questions described for the first section above. The third section posed questions about how respondents prioritized concern and potential protective actions for tornadoes and COVID-19 during spring and summer 2020. The final section consisted of questions related to demographic, socioeconomic, and political characteristics of the respondents, their respective households, and the physical properties of their homes. No direct PII and only up to three indirect identifiers have been retained in the data published in this repository.