A Scale for Measuring Social Distancing Behavior: Survey Questions and National Norms, USA 2020

"Social distancing", a set of "nonpharmaceutical interventions" or NPIs in the medical literature, is a primary defence, perhaps the primary defence, against infectious disease, universally advocated by medical authorities in the US and throughout the world during the current coronavirus pandemic. The idea is not new. Perhaps the first government-directed quarantine system was mid-fourteenth-century Venice's “quaranta giorni", forty days of mandated isolation for incoming ships. We propose a 5-item primary scale of "social distancing" behavior (KEK-3) and a slightly extended variant (KEK-3m), developed for use during the COVID-19 epidemic (and, potentially, beyond). The candidate items all had 7 answer categories. Assessment aligns very well with the classical measurement model for multi-item scales: interitem correlations are high; alpha reliability is 0.86; correlations with criterion variables are similar across the candidate items; factor analysis (oblimin rotation) finds a single dimension with an eigenvalue over 1 and loadings around .7. We provide behavioral norms for America during the 2020 pandemic and describe KEK-3's links to demographic and socioeconomic factors. Developing a replicable scale is especially important now, because many researchers are making erroneous comparisons using the same terminology to describe aspects of the epidemic which have been measured differently. To successfully assess the "...meaning of social change related to COVID-19, the newly emerging social practices due to lockdown measures..." (Esposito, Stark and Squazzoni 2020), high-quality measurements sufficiently reliable and robust to be replicated in different times as the epidemic evolves and in different settings are desperately needed: KEK-3 contributes to such a set of measures. Data: four large national sample surveys conducted April - July, 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. Data collection was through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk. This scale may be freely used by other researchers so long as its origin is acknowledged.