The second part of our coronavirus survey looks at the attitudes of industry people toward both the coronavirus and the threat to our businesses and industries.
Attitudes by respondents are changing quickly, both toward the coronavirus pandemic and its affect on business
We conducted the first survey from Monday, March 30 through Thursday, April 2, and 336 people responded. We broke our report into four areas:
- Audience characteristics
- Overall attitude
- Revenue changes
- Project and employee changes
The Overall Attitude section is below. Follow links on the sidebar to see the other sections.
We plan to do this survey every other week. If you have questions or would like to provide feedback, please contact Paul Deffenbaugh, editorial director, pdeffenbaugh@moderntrade.com
Overall Attitude
To compare these attitudes to the ones in the second survey, go here.
Architects and engineers are far more likely to see the coronavirus as a very dangerous threat compared to contractors and manufacturers. Excluding that cohort, over 55% of respondents rate the threat as very dangerous and over 35% rate it as somewhat dangerous. Of architects and engineers who do see the coronavirus as a threat, far more see it as substantial one.
We asked respondents to break out the threat to business from the overall coronavirus threat. Not surprisingly given the current economic situation, a vast majority of contractors, manufacturers and architects/engineers are worried or very worried about the business side of the pandemic. Of those who are neutral, which is a small percentage, manufacturers are most likely to be neutral.
One of the most interesting aspects of our survey was in the changing attitudes by our audience toward the coronavirus over time. Of those respondents who completed the survey on Monday, March 30, 88.5% saw the coronavirus pandemic as a threat. By Thursday, April 2, 92.4% of respondents saw it as a threat. But even more interesting is the percentage who saw it as not dangerous at all increased. In a survey of this size, when breaking these cohorts, that small number could be substantially changed by just a few respondents.
Shift in attitudes during even a few days is more prominent in the feelings our audience had about business. On Monday, just under 10% of respondents didn’t seem very concerned, rating their feelings as neutral, not very worried or not at all worried. By Thursday, though, those numbers had plummeted to almost zero.
