OUTDOOR BEHAVIORS DURING COVID-19 AND THEIR CONNECTION TO ENVIRONMENTAL RISK PERCEPTION

As legislative “Safer-At-Home” and “Shelter-In-Place” orders spread across the United States during the early stages of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses considered “non-essential” were temporarily or permanently closed and employees of those businesses were laid off, furloughed, or transitioned into work-from-home scenarios. The aims of this study, based upon a guiding framework of existing theories about how people connect with nature and the environment, are to determine: 1) how increased individual free time associated with changes in employment status may have influenced outdoor behaviors and activities, 2) how changes in those activities may have affected environmental risk perception among United States residents, and 3) the role of a variety of factors (e.g., demographics, worldview, climate knowledge, changes in employment due to COVID, etc.) on individual environmental risk perceptions and behaviors. It is hypothesized that time spent outside increased as a result of COVID-19, and this in turn predicts environmental risk perception among some groups of individuals. Using Amazon’s Mechanical TURK service, a total of 1,250 responses were collected from a developed and validated survey that included five constructs that were developed by using modified items from existing instruments and creating new ones when necessary. The five constructs consisted of respondents’: i.) environmental risk perceptions and awareness, ii.) climate knowledge, iii.) self-reported outdoor behavior before and after COVID orders, iv.) societal world-views, and v.) views on aspects of societal importance. Exploratory factor and reliability analyses were used to verify these constructs and resulting in Cronbach’s Alpha scores above 0.900 for four of the five constructs, indicating high reliability of the survey.