Journal article
Behaviours and attitudes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: insights from a cross-national Facebook survey
- Abstract:
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Background: In the absence of medical treatment and vaccination, individual behaviours are key to curbing the spread of COVID-19. Here we describe efforts to collect attitudinal and behavioural data and disseminate insights to increase situational awareness and inform interventions.
Methods: We developed a rapid data collection and monitoring system based on a cross-national online survey, the “COVID-19 Health Behavior Survey”. Respondent recruitment occurred via targeted Facebook advertisements in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We investigated how the threat perceptions of COVID-19, the confidence in the preparedness of organisations to deal with the pandemic, and the adoption of preventive and social distancing behaviours are associated with respondents’ demographic characteristics.
Results: We analysed 71,612 questionnaires collected between March 13-April 19, 2020. We found substantial spatio-temporal heterogeneity across countries at different stages of the pandemic and with different control strategies in place. Respondents rapidly adopted the use of face masks when they were not yet mandatory. We observed a clear pattern in threat perceptions, sharply increasing from a personal level to national and global levels. Although personal threat perceptions were comparatively low, all respondents significantly increased hand hygiene. We found gender-specific patterns: women showed higher threat perceptions, lower confidence in the healthcare system, and were more likely to adopt preventive behaviours. Finally, we also found that older people perceived higher threat to themselves, while all respondents were strongly concerned about their family.
Conclusions: Rapid population surveys conducted via Facebook allow us to monitor behavioural changes, adoption of protective measures, and compliance with recommended practices. As the pandemic progresses and new waves of infections are a threatening reality, timely insights from behavioural and attitudinal data are crucial to guide the decision-making process.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 2.0MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1140/epjds/s13688-021-00270-1
Authors
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/02jgyam08
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- EPJ Data Science More from this journal
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 17
- Publication date:
- 2021-04-14
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-03-11
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2193-1127
- Pmid:
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33880320
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1172815
- Local pid:
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pubs:1172815
- Deposit date:
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2024-07-23
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Perrotta et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2021, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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