ANN ARBOR—For many Americans, the emotional impact of last year’s terrorist attacks has not receded, according to a University of Michigan study that has surveyed the same nationally representative sample of U.S. adults one month, six months and now one year after Sept. 11, 2001. Fully 40 percent of those just interviewed said they felt less safe and secure now than they did before the attacks, compared to 47 percent interviewed six months after the attacks and 50 percent interviewed within a month afterward. The new survey findings suggest that the largest portion of the recovery from the psychological damage inflicted by the attacks occurred early.

One year later, the healing of the national psyche is far from complete, as there has been little improvement since March. Only one in five feel more secure now than immediately following the attacks, with about half of these reporting that they felt more secure by March and the rest saying they have improved only since then. Overall, about one-quarter (26 percent) of the 385 Americans who were surveyed in October, March and again in August reported at all three times that their personal sense of safety and security was shaken “a great deal” or “a good amount” by the attacks, according to the telephone survey conducted by the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), the world’s largest academic survey and research organization. One third of the respondents (36 percent) reported at all three times that their personal sense of safety and security had been affected only “a little” or “not at all” by last fall’s events, according to U-M political scientist Michael Traugott, a senior research scientist at the ISR and director of the second and third waves of the How Americans Respond survey. About nine out of 10 Americans surveyed (89 percent) think that it is likely that terrorist attacks or similar acts of violence will occur somewhere in the United States in the near future—about the same proportion as felt that way when last surveyed in March.

“People’s perceptions of the likelihood of an attack have not decreased,” says Traugott, noting that the percentage who viewed an attack in their own community as likely had also remained about the same from March to August, about 27 percent. “People are not as concerned about attacks where they live, but their concerns for other Americans remain high.” When asked what they thought the chance was that a major incident of bioterrorism would occur in the U.S. in the next five years, 77 percent of those surveyed in August said they thought the chances were 50-50 or greater and 24 percent believed the chances were 70 percent or greater.

“These proportions are about the same as the responses that the same people gave us when we interviewed them in March,” Traugott says. At both times, people thought the chances of a bioterror attack in their own communities were much lower. For symptoms of depression, anxiety and distress, the researchers likewise found no real changes from the March wave of the survey. Almost half (47 percent) said they had trouble concentrating, 27 percent said they felt depressed, 50 percent had restless sleep and 18 percent said they felt fearful some or most of the time. When they were interviewed originally a month after last year’s attacks, the proportions were much higher, with 65 percent reporting they had trouble concentrating, 52 percent saying they felt depressed, 60 percent saying they had restless sleep and 48 percent saying they felt fearful at least some of the time during the past week.

The same pattern held for the ways respondents reported spending their time since the terrorist attacks. When asked last October what had changed for them since Sept. 11, 82 percent said they were spending more time with their families and 58 percent reported spending more time with friends. By March, only 33 percent said they were spending more time with their families and 17 percent said they were spending more time with friends. In August, those percentages remained about the same, at 34 percent and 19 percent, respectively. People with children under the age of 18 living at home with them reported about the same level of symptoms of anxiety and distress for them in August as they had last October, the researchers noted. (Questions about children were not asked in the March interviews.) In August, 29 percent said their children had been more easily annoyed or short-tempered in the past week, 23 percent reported children had more trouble keeping their minds on what they were doing and about 14 percent said the children had been more easily startled by ordinary noises.

Some changes were evident, however, in the ways parents behaved with their children, suggesting a slight decline in their need to reassure their children. When first interviewed a month after the attacks, 43 percent reported talking with children about things that worried or frightened them in the past week, compared to 32 percent of those surveyed in August. And while 54 percent of those interviewed immediately following the attacks reported reassuring children that they were safe “in the past week,” just 34 percent said they did so in August.

“Even adults without children at home seemed more vigilant of children’s well-being,” says ISR director David L. Featherman, a member of the How Americans Respond research team. “Many reported talking with children about the events and carefully observing children’s responses.” In the most recent survey, the ISR researchers also asked a series of new questions about adult interactions with children, in general. Four in 10 (38 percent) said that since Sept. 11 they had been talking more than usual with children 17 or younger, theirs or others, about world events. And 36 percent said they had been talking with children more than usual about people from other cultures or religions and 32 percent said they had been alerting children to possible dangers in their lives related to terrorism. Only 13 percent said they had been with any children who were upset in any way by terrorism.

* * * * * * * How Americans Respond is an on-going collaborative, interdisciplinary research project at the U-M Institute for Social Research, funded in part by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Howard R. Marsh Center in the U-M Department of Communication Studies. Social scientists involved in the survey design and analysis include economists Richard Curtin, Thomas Juster, Robert Willis, David Weir and Matthew Shapiro; psychologists James Jackson, Robert Kahn and David Featherman; political scientists Michael Traugott, Donald Kinder, Mark Tessler and Theodore Brader, and survey methodologists Robert Groves, Beth-Ellen Pennell and Martha Hill. The preliminary August survey results are based on repeat interviews conducted between Of these, 385 were also interviewed between September 15 and Oct. 7, 2001 and between of error” is estimated to be six percentage points for the entire panel sample and will be higher for statistics computed on subgroups. In addition to sampling error, use of the survey to describe the full U.S. household population is limited by the omission of non-telephone households, non-response to the survey, and failure to obtain accurate responses from sample persons.

* * * * * Established in 1948, the Institute for Social Research (ISR) is among the world’s oldest survey research organizations, and a world leader in the development and application of social science methodology. ISR conducts some of the most widely-cited studies in the nation, including the Survey of Consumer Attitudes, the National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. Visit the ISR Web site at www.isr.umich.edu for more information. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest computerized social science data archive.