The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on risk perceptions: differences between ethnic groups in Germany

ABSTRACT

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, people perceive their health and finances to be at greater risk than before. Using data from CILS4COVID, an add-on study to the German long-term project CILS4EU-DE, surveying young adults aged 24–26, we show that these risk perceptions are prevalent in populations with a former Yugoslavian, Turkish, and Asian background, although we find only few differences between the German majority and the ethnic minority groups overall. Contrary to expectations, we were not able to fully explain these systematic differences with sociodemographic, experiential and sociocultural factors. Nevertheless, our analysis provides important insights into mechanisms underlying the increased perception of risk during the pandemic irrespective of respondents’ ethnic origin.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk perception
• health worries
• financial worries
• COVID-19 pandemic
• ethnic minorities
• social inequalities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Missing values due to item nonresponse were imputed. The results are rather robust when comparing the analyses with and without the imputed data. For more information on the handling of missing values, see Appendix A5.

2 We report OLS results for ease of interpretation. However, since the scale of the dependent variables is ordinal, we repeat our estimations using ordered probit models with the answer categories ‘far less’ and ‘somewhat less’ combined due to restrictions in the sample size. These models yield similar substantial results (see Appendix A6).

3 The general tendency to worry alone does not explain these differences (see Appendix A7).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG): [grant numbers KA 1602/8-1, KA 1602/8-2, KO 3601/8-1, KO 3601/8-2]; NORFACE ERA NET Plus Migration in Europe-programme; Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES).

Notes on contributors

Hannah Soiné

Hannah Soiné is a doctoral student at the University of Mannheim and a researcher in the CILS4EU-DE project at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES). Her research focuses on ethnic inequalities, the perception of immigrants, and the role language plays for integration.

Leonie Kriegel

Leonie Kriegel is a doctoral student at the University of Mannheim and a researcher in the CILS4EU-DE project at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES). Her research interests are ethnic inequalities, cultural integration and structural participation as part of the integration process.

Jörg Dollmann

Jörg Dollmann is a post-doc researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) and the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM). He currently organises the CILS4EU-DE project, which is a long-term project of the German Research Foundation (DFG). His research interests are social and ethnic inequalities, institutional settings and educational success, and the integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities in a comparative perspective.