Influence of trust on two different risk perceptions as an affective and cognitive dimension during Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) outbreak in South Korea: serial cross-sectional surveys

Jang, Won Mo; Kim, Un-Na; Jang, Deok Hyun; Jung, Hyemin; Cho, Sanghyun; Eun, Sang Jun; Lee, Jin Yong

The general characteristics of the participants are shown in Table 2 . There were no statistically significant differences between surveys. Nearly half of the participants were female, aged <50 years, were educated up to high school or below, were from the affected area, showed disapproval of the president or the ruling party, and had personal-level risk perception. Majority of the participants were employed, were in the middle economic status, metropolitan, without societal-level risk perception (controlled). Figure 1 reports how the outbreak proceeded, with three overlapping transmission periods, the timing of the five independent surveys, and the risk perception rates. Noticeable differences were investigated between personal-level and societal-level risk proportions throughout the epidemic periods. Overall risk perception at personal-level proportion (56.5%) was nearly two times higher than at societal-level (30.3%). Personal-level risk perception proportions were always higher than societal-level during the present study periods. Of the personal-level risk perception, proportion was initially high during survey 1 (67.3%), declined during survey 2 (55.1%), temporally rose during survey 3 (62.8%), and declined again during surveys 4 and 5 (52.2% and 44.9%, respectively). A similar trend was observed in the societal-level risk perception proportions. The percentages of respondents who reported as being "worried" or "uncontrolled" decreased gradually after survey 3. Societal-level risk perception proportions decreased more rapidly than personal-level, over time, from 52.6% and 62.8% in survey 3 to 9.0% and 44.9% in survey 5, respectively. At the beginning of the occurrences of tertiary and quaternary cases, we identified high perceived risk in both the personal-level and societal-level proportions. 29 ; 95% CI 1.27-6.66). Higher level of education was also associated with lower level of risk perception at the personal-level, but was not statistically significant except university degree in the overall survey (aOR 0.73; 95% CI 0.55-0.96). Lower economic status and those living in metropolitan cities paid more attention to the personal-level risk of MERS-CoV in the overall model. Those who disapproved of the president and the ruling party had higher risk perception at the personal-level; the peak of disapproval was found in survey 2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 u.a.: unavailable data; * P < 0.05. a There was small sample size of those who perceived societal-level risk those in the upper economic level in survey 5, the perceived household economic status was excluded from the survey 5 model.