Context, design and conduct of the longitudinal COVID‐19 psychological research consortium study–wave 3

Orla McBride, Sarah Butter, Jamie Murphy, Mark Shevlin, Todd K. Hartman, Philip Hyland, Ryan McKay, Kate M. Bennett, Jilly Gibson‐Miller, Liat Levita, Liam Mason, Anton P. Martinez, Thomas VA Stocks, Frédérique Vallières, Thanos Karatzias, Carmen Valiente, Carmelo Vazquez, Richard P. Bentall

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Abstract

Objectives: The COVID-19 Psychological Research Consortium (C19PRC) Study aims to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the adult population in multiple countries. This paper describes the third wave of the UK survey (the ‘parent’ strand of the Consortium) during July-August 2020. Methods: Adults (N = 2025) who participated in the baseline and/or first follow-up surveys were reinvited to participate in this survey, which assessed: (1) COVID-19 related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours; (2) the occurrence of common mental disorders; as well as the role of (3) psychological factors and (4) social and political attitudes, in influencing the public’s response to the pandemic. Weights were calculated using a survey raking algorithm to ensure that the cross-sectional sample is nationally representative in terms of gender, age, and household income, and representative of the baseline sample characteristics for household composition, ethnicity, urbanicity and born/raised in UK. Results: 1166 adults (57.6% of baseline participants) provided full interviews at Wave 3. The raking procedure successfully re-balanced the cross-sectional sample to within 1% of population estimates across selected socio-demographic characteristics. Conclusion: This paper demonstrates the strength of the C19PRC Study data to facilitate and stimulate interdisciplinary research addressing important public health questions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere1880
JournalInternational Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research
Volume30
Issue number3
Early online date22 May 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished (in print/issue) - 30 Sept 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
As detailed elsewhere, the C19PRC study commenced in the UK, but has since expanded to include international partners in the Republic of Ireland (RoI), Spain, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The UK strand of the Study, to which we refer as C19PRC‐UK, is the ‘parent’ survey of the Consortium and is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK. Where possible/appropriate, international partners model their fieldwork procedures and survey content for each wave on the C19PRC‐UK design, although there are important differences between the countries in terms of the timing of fieldwork and survey content. For example, in the RoI and Spain, the first two waves were conducted during March/April and May 2020 (Hyland et al., 2020 ; Valiente et al., 2020 ), which was consistent with the UK, whereas in Italy, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, baseline and follow‐up waves were conducted between April and August 2020 (Bruno et al., 2021 ). Whereas the UK survey has a strong focus on collecting socio‐political survey content (McBride et al., 2020 ), a key priority for the Spanish team was to measure and assess positive psychosocial responses to the pandemic (e.g., posttraumatic growth, hedonic and eudaimonic well‐being, openness to the future, primal positive beliefs, etc.; Valiente et al., 2020 , 2021 ). The Consortium is committed to data harmonisation (where possible) to facilitate multi‐country research studies, and this complex programme of work is on‐going. Between April and September 2020, the Consortium produced 14 academic papers analysing the rich survey data, and several of these involved multi‐country data analysis (Hartman et al., 2020 ; Hyland et al., 2021 ; Murphy et al., 2021 ). All outputs are accessible via the dedicated OSF, COVID‐19 Psychological Research Consortium (C19PRC) Panel Study (2020) hosted with the Open Science Framework.

Funding Information:
UKRI/ESRC funding for this UK strand of this study was obtained in May 2020 (Grant ref: ES/V004379/1). Instituto de Salud Carlos III funding for the Spanish strand was obtained in September 2020 (Grant ref: COV20/00737-CM).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Keywords

  • ORIGINAL ARTICLE
  • COVID‐19
  • general population
  • longitudinal
  • psychological
  • survey methodology
  • COVID-19

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