New paper on contextual risk and preventive health behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic published in Sociological Spectrum

Health outcomes are known to depend on context, but much less is known about how context shapes preventive behavior. In this paper, we combined county-level COVID-19 incidence data from Germany with a representative survey of 9,023 people. People living in regions with higher infection rates took more preventive measures. This association was serially mediated by how often people received information about their local infection situation and by how susceptible they perceived themselves to be. Our findings highlight perceived susceptibility as a key factor linking regional risk to individual preventive behavior.

Read the paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02732173.2025.2611875