Laboratory

Population Dynamics and Sustainable Well-Being

Project

Assessing the Social Consequences of COVID-19

Robert Gordon Rinderknecht; in Collaboration with Long Doan, Liana C. Sayer, Jessica N. Fish, Kelsey J. Drotning (all: University of Maryland, College Park, USA)

Detailed Description

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered daily life across the world: It has led to changes in routine, employment, and social engagement, among other factors. Researchers and the public more broadly worry that these changes have a wide array of negative effects on health and well-being, with some referring to the pandemic as ushering in a “social recession,” marked by increasing isolation and loneliness. The extent to which these concerns are valid and for whom remains an open question and a valuable area of research. Yet, little research has been done to precisely measure broad aspects of daily life throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, partly due to the challenges of measuring time use effectively. In this project, we seek to provide such data and to analyze them.

To gain a deeper understanding of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and well-being in the US, our research builds on survey and time-use data that we collected in the US just prior to the implementation of widespread social distancing measures (from February to early March 2020). In this, the first wave, 314 participants provided detailed time-use data covering approximately three days of their lives. We expanded our sample in Wave 2 (from April to May 2020), Wave 3 (from late October to November 2020), and Wave 4 (from April to July 2021), seeking to retain as many participants of previous waves as possible. We are currently maintaining a panel data set with over 5,000 US residents, and we recently completed collecting a fifth wave of data collection spanning November 2022 to March 2023.

We recruit participants primarily through the crowdsourcing platform Prolific. All participants are invited to complete an introductory survey that records demographic information, data on mental and physical health, perceptions of COVID-19, and related measures. We then direct participants to create an account with our time-diary platform: Participants report detailed information about what they plan to do during the following day, when they engage in these activities, and other contextual information, including where they were, with whom they were, and how they felt. We ensure high data quality by restricting our sample to respondents with a positive reputation on the platform (i.e., they have little or no history of having past work rejected) and use post-stratification weighting to help address the underrepresentation of certain groups, such as older and non-white respondents.

One of our results, with research based on our primary data collection, is a disproportionately negative impact of the pandemic on the health and well-being of sexual minority adults, particularly bisexual adults (Fish et al. 2021), declines in mental health and well-being among sexual minority young persons (Salerno et al. 2021), and increases in domestic violence (Drotning et al. 2022). Methodologically, we have offered an innovative approach for the collection of time diaries (Rinderknecht, Doan, and Sayer 2022).

Funding for this project has been provided by the US National Science Foundation, under Grant No. SES-2029963 and the University of Maryland Vice President for Research Coronavirus Research Seed Program. The Max Planck Society supported Wave 5 via a cooperation agreement between the University of Maryland and the MPIDR.

Research Keywords:

Data and Surveys

Region keywords:

America