Impact of Public Risk Perception in China on the Intention to Use Sports APPs during COVID-19 Pandemic

At the onset of the 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, China effectively reduced the risk of a major outbreak through measures such as lockdown, quarantine and closure, which also brought the country to a standstill with normal social operations largely becoming stagnant, including suspension of production, schools and business. In active response to this non-normality, the nation has resorted to various apps to promptly restore social operations, forming a new norm of ‘offline life’ as supplementary to ‘online life’. Although a variety of increasingly sophisticated APPs have gradually restored the public’s life and work, the people’s emotions and psychology are still under influence from the risk environment of COVID-19 with high mortality and infection rates. Then, given that existing APPs have been proved effective in many areas in a risky society, is the Chinese public willing to use sports APPs to exercise as an active response to the pandemic? With risk perception theories as the foundation, this study explores the impact of risk perception on the intention to use sports apps among the Chinese public, and introduces ‘self-efficacy’ and ‘social norms’ as mediating and moderating variables, respectively; the two factors, deemed closely related to app use behaviours, have been customarily considered in previous studies. This study aims to fill the research gap in terms of the influence of risk perception on public behaviour in the context of emerging life states during global public health events, and to enrich the spectrum of risk perception theories. During the study, 1366 valid questionnaires were collected and analysed using hierarchical linear regression (HLR). The results show that risk perception, self-efficacy and social norms significantly influence the intention to use sports apps, and that the stronger the perception of the risk is, the higher the usage intention. Among the three factors, social norms during COVID-19 play a moderating role in the relationship between risk perception and the intention to use such apps.