By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
In an effort to measure public attitudes toward the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the Sitka Sound Science Center is conducting a survey asking a number of questions, ranging from risk assessment to economic worry.
“The data will be really valuable for risk managers… and our intention is to provide a second survey later in the season as the pandemic develops further,” Science Center Research Director Ron Heintz said.
Heintz has worked with the Science Center for a year, and before that he ran a NOAA lab which studied forage fish.
He hopes to measure how the public’s attitudes toward the virus change over time.
The Science Center is working with the RAND Corporation, of Santa Monica, California, on the new survey. The Science Center and RAND also are cooperating on a landslide warning project underway in Sitka.
From a social science perspective, Heintz said, “we’re kind of interested in how people are weighing risk, and how they are thinking about it and how their behavior is changing.”
With businesses in Sitka and around the world shut down because of the pandemic, Heintz said, the survey is intended to quantify individuals’ concern for their economic well being.
“We want to know what people are thinking about the economic situation. At the Science Center people are still working, it’s dicey but it’s happening. But we know that’s not the case for everybody,” Heintz said.
The survey questions cover a broad range, but an important topic during a pandemic is mental health, he said.
“Social isolation causes people to be isolated, so there are a lot of concerns with how people are dealing with that,” Heintz said.
Food security also features in the survey.
“Subsistence is important in Southeast Alaska, and our experience with the ferries from last winter made really clear that the supply chain for groceries in Southeast can be tenuous,” he said, “and so we are wondering if this virus and the pandemic have added to these concerns, and if people are responding to that by relying on subsistence harvest.”
Other questions revolve around how people perceive their risk of becoming infected, who they trust as a source of news, and how they feel about the prospect of seasonal workers coming to their towns.
The survey is open to anyone in Southeast Alaska at sitkascience.org. The survey is anonymous and takes about ten minutes to complete.
Heintz said that the survey will end either on May 15, or if a COVID-19 case occurs in Sitka. A second survey will go public in July, dependent on funding.
