Perceived Costs Associated with Protective Actions across Multiple Threats

Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) is a framework that predicts the influence of messages about threats on intended protective behavior. This theoretic lens, which grew out of the fear appeals approach to media effects, has been widely applied to analyze and predict health-related protective behaviors, information security behaviors, and other behaviors. However, it has rarely been contextualized to weather-related behaviors or transportation behaviors—additional domains in which it can illuminate our understanding of protection motivation. Research examining protective decision making across hazards is also much less common than research focusing on response to a particular hazard. Thus, our research will fill an important gap in the literature.

PMT predicts that the intention to engage in a protective behavior will be the result of two factors, threat appraisal and coping appraisal. Threat appraisal is formed by an individual’s perception of the threat severity along with the perception of their susceptibility to that threat. Coping comprises perceptions of response efficacy (how well a response will help protect them from the threat) and self-efficacy (how well they are able to carry out the response), as well as the costs associated with the response. Our project focuses on this last component—response cost, which may be tangible or intangible. We specifically look at the response costs associated with 21 different hazards, including 6 weather hazards (flooding, lightning, winter weather, high heat, and two tornado threats). In addition to assessing perceptions of threat severity and threat susceptibility for each hazard, we examine the efficacy and response costs associated with each hazard. Our study is unique in that our measure of response costs is along multiple dimensions. For each response, we ask survey participants to rate the response according to 9 “costs,” such as the monetary cost, how much it would interfere with usual habits, and so on. Preliminary results from this survey will be presented here. Specifically, we aim to show how response costs vary across hazard types, and how factors such as the perceived severity of the threat influence the perception of the costs to protect oneself from it. Our findings will inform future studies of weather-related decision processes and outcomes, as contrasted with other risk-oriented individual-level decisions.