Arbeitsbereich
Bevölkerungsdynamik und Nachhaltiges Wohlbefinden
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Projekte
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Team
Projekt
The COVID-19 Health Behavior Survey
Daniela Perrotta, Jessica Donzowa, Emilio Zagheni, André Grow-Böser, Emanuele Del Fava, Beatriz Sofía Gil Clavel; in Zusammenarbeit mit Jorge Cimentada (MPIDR), Francesco Rampazzo (University of Oxford, Großbritannien)
Ausführliche Beschreibung
The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly affected our day-to-day life in unprecedented ways, posing serious challenges for governments and societies. To curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2, governments implemented a variety of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as stay-at-home measures, physical distancing regulations, constraints on nonessential movements, and recommendations for good hand hygiene and the use of face masks. Achieving universal adoption of public health recommendations and compliance with NPIs was critical to minimizing the burden of COVID-19, especially at a time when vaccines were not yet available. However, a key problem is the lack of data that can be used to assess people’s behaviors and responses during outbreaks, and this may hinder the design and implementation of effective communication strategies and evidence-based decision-making.
In this project, we collected primary data and leveraged alternative data sources to gain insights into people’s behavioral responses to the pandemic and help fight the current as well as future global outbreaks. At the core of the project is the COVID-19 Health Behavior Survey, a cross-national online survey we conducted in eight countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The questionnaire was designed to collect key information on people’s health status, behaviors, social contacts, and attitudes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Respondents were recruited via targeted Facebook advertisement campaigns. This allowed us to quickly reach large numbers of respondents in several countries simultaneously. Participation in the survey was voluntary, anonymous, and open to Facebook users at least 18 years old. The survey ran from March 13 to August 12, 2020, resulting in more than 140,000 completed questionnaires.
The development of rapid data collection with recruitment pursued via targeted social media ads, along with appropriate survey designs and statistical methods to address biases in the sample, enabled us to provide important behavioral insights during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Compared to other studies, our data collection stands out for its timeliness, cross-national and comparative nature, and population coverage, which allowed us to collect a unique dataset during the first months of the pandemic in Europe and the United States.
We have several results: People’s reactions to the pandemic differed across demographic groups, and the effect of nonpharmaceutical interventions on contact patterns varied across countries. Women and older individuals generally perceived COVID-19 as a larger threat than did men and younger individuals. Women were also more likely than men to adopt a wide range of preventive behaviors. The threat perception played a role in the adoption of preventive behaviors, such as wearing a face mask, when looking at vulnerable segments of the population (e.g., older adults, people with preexisting health conditions). Further, social contact numbers decreased more after governments issued physical distancing guidelines compared to the national lockdown measures announced later on. Compared to pre-COVID levels, social contact numbers decreased by 48%-85% during the first few months of the pandemic across the surveyed countries.
Schnellumfragen, deren Teilnehmer über gezielte Facebook-Werbung rekrutiert wurden, geben Aufschluss über die ersten Reaktionen der Menschen auf die COVID-19-Pandemie
© Perrotta, D., Grow, A., Rampazzo, F., Cimentada, J., Del Fava, E., Gil-Clavel, S., & Zagheni, E. (2021). Behaviours and attitudes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: insights from a cross-national Facebook survey. EPJ data science, 10(1), 17. / Perrotta, D., Del Fava, E., & Zagheni, E. (2021). The role of vulnerability in mediating the relationship between threat perception and the use of face masks in the context of COVID-19. In Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
- The scatterplot shows the relationship between the threat of COVID-19 perceived by women (y-axis) and men (x-axis), for different types of threat, and by age groups. We observe that the threat perception is significantly higher among women than men and among older adults than younger people.
- The heatmap shows the adoption rate of face masks in relation to the threat perceived personally (x-axis) across countries (y-axis). The threat perception serves as an indicator of differentiated behavioral responses in the population with subgroups perceiving higher threat perceptions being more likely to adopt preventive behaviors.
- The scatterplot shows the relationship between the threat perception to oneself by respondents with (y-axis) or without (x-axis) vulnerability, by country. While the vulnerable groups cluster by country, from lowest threat perception in Germany to highest in the United Kingdom, we measure that the threat perception is much higher among vulnerable segments of the population.
Daten und Erhebungen, Gesundheitsversorgung, Public Health, Medizin und Epidemiologie
Europa, Vereinigte Staaten
Publikationen
Donzowa, J.; Perrotta, D.; Zagheni, E.:
MPIDR Working Paper WP-2023-047. (2023)
Grow, A.; Perrotta, D.; Del Fava, E.; Cimentada, J.; Rampazzo, F.; Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Zagheni, E.; Flores, R. D.; Ventura, I.; Weber, I. G.:
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society/A 185:S2, S343–S363. (2022)
Grow, A.; Perrotta, D.; Del Fava, E.; Cimentada, J.; Rampazzo, F.; Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Zagheni, E.; Flores, R. D.; Ventura, I.; Weber, I. G.:
MPIDR Working Paper WP-2021-006. (2021)
Liu, C. Y.; Berlin, J.; Kiti, M. C.; Del Fava, E.; Grow, A.; Zagheni, E.; Melegaro, A.; Jenness, S. M.; Omer, S. B.; Lopman, B.; Nelson, K.:
medRxiv preprints. unpublished. (2021)
Liu, C. Y.; Berlin, J.; Kiti, M. C.; Del Fava, E.; Grow, A.; Zagheni, E.; Melegaro, A.; Jenness, S. M.; Omer, S. B.; Lopman, B.; Nelson, K.:
Epidemiology 32:6, 781–791. (2021)
Perrotta, D.; Del Fava, E.; Zagheni, E.:
In: Workshop Proceedings of the Fifteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2021): 7 June 2021 (virtual), 1–4. Palo Alto, CA: AAAI Press. (2021)
Perrotta, D.; Grow, A.; Rampazzo, F.; Cimentada, J.; Del Fava, E.; Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Zagheni, E.:
EPJ Data Science 10:17, 1–13. (2021)
Del Fava, E.; Cimentada, J.; Perrotta, D.; Grow, A.; Rampazzo, F.; Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Zagheni, E.:
medRxiv preprints. unpublished. (2020)
Grow, A.; Perrotta, D.; Del Fava, E.; Cimentada, J.; Rampazzo, F.; Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Zagheni, E.:
SocArXiv papers. unpublished. (2020)
Grow, A.; Perrotta, D.; Del Fava, E.; Cimentada, J.; Rampazzo, F.; Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Zagheni, E.:
Journal of Medical Internet Research 22:12, e20653–e20653. (2020)
Klüsener, S.; Schneider, R.; Rosenbaum-Feldbrügge, M.; Dudel, C.; Loichinger, E.; Sander, N.; Backhaus, A.; Del Fava, E.; Esins, J.; Fischer, M.; Grabenhenrich, L.; Grigoriev, P.; Grow, A.; Hilton, J. D.; Koller, B.; Myrskylä, M.; Scalone, F.; Wolkewitz, M.; Zagheni, E.; Resch, M. M.:
medRxiv preprints. unpublished. (2020)
Perrotta, D.; Grow, A.; Rampazzo, F.; Cimentada, J.; Del Fava, E.; Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Zagheni, E.:
medRxiv preprints. unpublished. (2020)