Awareness, Perceived Risk, and Protective Behavior Towards Covid-19 Among Undergraduate Students of Delhi and NCR, India

ABSTRACT

Preventive measures are the best cure for any disease as they reduce the infection rate. Preventive measures are affected by knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards the disease. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the awareness, perceived risk, and protective behavior toward COVID-19 among undergraduate students of the Delhi and National Capital Region, India. An online questionnaire-based random survey was conducted amongst 605 undergraduate students to assess the demographic characteristics of participants, their level of awareness, perceived risk, and protective behavior regarding COVID-19. The overall awareness, perceived risk, and protective behavior for COVID-19 were found high in undergraduate students (0.000***,0.000***,0.000***). When variable (Gender, area of living, and subject studies) based analysis was performed among participants, a non-statistical significance difference was observed in total awareness among them (p>0.05) towards COVID-19 (p=0.996, 0.121, 0.937). Whereas Female, urban, and science participants were found to perceive the risk for COVID-19 more accurately in comparison to male, rural and non-science participants in total perceive risk analysis (p= 0.016**, 0.035**, 0.036**). However, urban participants showed more Total protective behavior as compared to the rural participants (p=0.048**) and there was no statistical significance difference in protective behavior in terms of Male/Female and Science/ non-science participants (p=0.189, 0.100). These findings will contribute to the continued regional/ global efforts to better understand preventive crisis response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study emphasizes the need for conducting periodic webinars for educational intervention for all college students which could be useful to create more awareness.