German COVID-19 Snapshot Monitoring (COSMO) - Welle 11 (12.05.2020)

In a crisis such as the current outbreak of the newly emerged coronavirus, it is of utmost importance to monitor public perceptions of risk, protective and preparedness behaviours, public trust, as well as knowledge and misinformation to enable government spokespeople, the media, and health organizations to implement adequate responses (WHO Europe, 2017; World Health Organization, 2017). The purpose of this serial cross-sectional study COSMO is to allow rapid and adaptive monitoring of these variables over time and to assess the relations between risk perceptions, knowledge and misinformation to preparedness and protective behaviour regarding COVID-19 in Germany.

Conspiracy beliefs seem a highly relevant phenomenon in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic as indicated, for example, by social media influencers regularly referring to or promoting conspiracy theories. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to test hypotheses concerning correlates of generic beliefs in conspiracy theories. For this study, we identified four key hypotheses from the extant literature concerning both the predictors and possible outcomes of generic beliefs in conspiracy theories. Specifically, we plan to examine whether generic beliefs in conspiracy theories are correlated with (1) level of education, (2) trust in media, public health institutions, the government, and science, (3) fears and worries and (4) preventive behavior using OLS regression models.

In a crisis such as the current outbreak of the newly emerged coronavirus, it is of utmost importance to monitor public perceptions of risk, protective and preparedness behaviours, public trust, as well as knowledge and misinformation to enable government spokespeople, the media, and health organizations to implement adequate responses (WHO Europe, 2017; World Health Organization, 2017). The purpose of this serial cross-sectional study COSMO is to allow rapid and adaptive monitoring of these variables over time and to assess the relations between risk perceptions, knowledge and misinformation to preparedness and protective behaviour regarding COVID-19 in Germany.