MU associate professor Haselswerdt: 'The real public health trends are still getting through to people'

A study, conducted by the University of Missouri (UM), suggests that individuals' political leanings, despite being present at the local level, don't appear to overshadow how they perceive the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their own communities, according to a news release published by MU on January 11.

The findings, which were published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, were revealed after researchers studied survey responses from 1,000 participants, who took the Cooperative Election Study in 2020. The researchers found that, even those who supported Republican candidates, were aware of the severity of the pandemic in their own communities.

“While there is definitely politics going on in terms of the way people perceive the COVID-19 pandemic, it's not drowning out what’s happening in real life,” said Truman School of Government and Public Affairs associate professor Jake Haselswerdt. “The real public health trends are still getting through to people.”

The researchers also found that individual perceptions of the pandemic do matter in one expected area: support for COVID-related policies.

“Not surprisingly, we found people who believe the situation was more severe in their counties were more supportive of restrictions, like mask mandates and closing K-12 schools and businesses,” Haselswerdt said. “On the other hand, we found no relationship between county-level perceptions of the pandemic and the way respondents say they voted in the 2020 election.”

Unexpectedly, Haselswerdt didn't find a filter bubble effect with Republicans and Fox News viewers. While Americans with the related political leanings did give significantly lower estimates of the pandemic's local severity, the estimates were still related to their actual county case rate, suggesting that they were still reached by local public health information.

“We were expecting to find [with Republicans and viewers of Fox News] that ‘it doesn't matter what the COVID-19 rate is in my county because I'm not paying attention to it, and maybe I don't even believe it anyway,’” said Haselswerdt. “Or, ‘I have information sources that I listen to telling me that it's no big deal or masking and shutting down schools is a waste of time.’ But that's not what we found. Instead, we found the real world still matters to people.”

The results from the MU study are similar to those found in an earlier study Haselswerdt and University of Minnesota associate professor Sarah Gollust conducted regarding the opioid epidemic and political voting behavior. In that study, Haselswerdt and Gollust also found that public perceptions of the opioid epidemic on a local level didn't translate to political behavior.

Haselswerdt and Gollust are currently working with some of the data collected from the more recent study for a related project examining what kinds of people Americans think are most vulnerable to COVID-19, such as those with pre-existing conditions, the elderly, and those of different races and ethnicities.