Judgment, decision making, and risk researchers have learned a great deal over the years about how people prepare for and react to global risks. In recent years, risk scholars have increasingly focused their energies on climate change, and as pandemic coronavirus has swept the globe many of these scholars are comparing the coronavirus pandemic with climate change to inform risk management. Risk communication research and the best practices developed from it are predicated on findings from the 1970's to the present showing that there are structural similarities in how people think about widely divergent risks. Consequently, these lessons from risk communication of climate change (and from the canon of best practices) apply to the coronavirus pandemic. In the empirical comparison of student perceptions reported here, we replicate these structural similarity findings, but also find that moral concerns in particular deserve attention as a potentially distinct dimension of risk perception, on which different risks may also differ, as pandemic risks appear to evoke less moral concern than climate change. The need for communications to be timely, honest, credible, empathetic, and informative for useful individual actions is fundamental and essential for communicating effectively about the coronavirus epidemic. Some countries have heeded risk sciences, and are coping more successfully with pandemic coronavirus. Others have failed to implement these old lessons, which our data suggest still apply. While these failures may reinforce cynicism about political and public enthusiasm for accepting science, comparisons between the coronavirus pandemic and climate change may also foster greater aspirations for collective action.

In this study we investigated the amount of social capital as well as its effect on subjective well-being for the whole Austrian population and separately for rural-and urban areas. By using the Austrian Social Survey 2018, we were able to analyze various social capital dimensions based on a conceptual model developed by Kawachi (2008), namely informal and formal social capital, social support as well as social and institutional trust. We observed differences between rural and urban areas in the social-capital dimension of informal social capital: Individuals in rural areas report more contacts with lower-skilled vocations and more family contacts while individuals from urban areas report more social participation and more contact with a close friend. For the Austrian population as a whole, more contacts with highly educated professions, frequent contact (at least several times a week) with a close friend, as well as social and institutional trust, foster subjective well-being. Frequent contact with up to three distinct family members fosters subjective well-being for the entire Austrian sample as well as for individuals living in rural-, but not in urban areas. This study extends previous research by showing different amounts of informal social capital between urban and rural areas as well as different effects on subjective well-being. To summarize, our results confirm the beneficial influence of certain social capital dimensions on subjective well-being in Austria taking into account control variables based on previous research, while showing different patterns and effects of informal social capital between urban and rural areas.

ZusammenfassungGesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt, Solidarität und Vertrauen sind während der Corona-Krise zu viel beschworenen Schlagwörtern geworden. Sie stehen für eine Form sozialen Kapitals, das in Zeiten der Krise eine wesentliche Ressource zu deren Bewältigung darstellen soll und auch von politischer und medizinischer Seite oftmals eingefordert wird. Eng verbunden mit dem Begriff der Solidarität ist jener des sozialen Vertrauens. Das Vertrauen in andere Menschen sowie in zentrale gesellschaftliche Institutionen wird als wichtige Komponente des Sozialkapitals einer Gesellschaft betrachtet und gilt als wesentliche Grundlage für den gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt. Das Buchkapitel beschäftigt sich mit der Solidarität und dem sozialen Vertrauen in der österreichischen Bevölkerung während der ersten Welle der Covid-19-Pandemie anhand der Daten des Austrian Corona Panel Projects. Untersucht wird, wie sich das Ausmaß des sozialen Vertrauens im Vergleich zu früher verändert hat und inwieweit es Unterschiede zwischen verschiedenen Bevölkerungsgruppen gibt, die von der Pandemie besonders betroffen sind (z. B. Vorerkrankte, Personen in beengten Wohnverhältnissen, Alleinlebende, Eltern von schulpflichtigen Kindern, Alleinerziehende, beruflich Betroffene). Des Weiteren wird untersucht, wie sich die Wahrnehmung des gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalts während der Zeit der Covid-19-Pandemie entwickelt hat, inwieweit sich solidarisches Handeln in verschiedenen Personengruppen unterscheidet und in welchem Ausmaß soziales Vertrauen zum solidarischen Handeln beiträgt.

No abstract

No abstract