Understanding the social impacts of coronavirus under different health restrictions: Longitudinal analysis using the ONS OPN Covid-19 survey
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Strathclyde
Department Name: Social Work and Social Policy
Abstract
Data from the 'Coronavirus and the Social Impacts on Great Britain' survey are used to assess social impacts as the COVID-19 crisis deepens. This project reports on the social impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on people's health and subjective wellbeing (SWB) in Great Britain; reports on the public understanding of information about the coronavirus, along with people's behavioural responses and actions to prevent disease spread; reports on how individuals, families and communities are coping and managing risks, considering behavioural impacts and lifestyle changes and how people are building resilience during the pandemic and the social impacts under different conditions and governmental restrictions. The study adopts a longitudinal approach to social impacts by merging survey data covering the period March 2020 to September 2021. This provides a combined sample size of c.70,000 respondents, with sufficient statistical power to support a detailed subnational level analysis. This policy-orientated research is made possible thanks to the new Coronavirus and social impacts survey that has been in continual operation since March 2020. The data from this survey is made available to accredited researchers by the UK Office for National Statistics.
Organisations
| Description | Initial Results Report 16 March 2022 The COVID-19 pandemic is harming population health and wellbeing but some sections of the population have felt the detrimental effects of the pandemic more than others. felt The wellbeing of people with poor health and underlying health conditions were significantly impacted by COVID-19. People with a disability, unemployed people, single person households, and the wellbeing of women/females in the pandemic was significantly impacted compared to men. Outcome measurements: • We have four measurements of well-being available to us from the national UK social surveys, all on a scale from 0 to 10 for life satisfaction (MCZ-1), worthwhileness (MCZ-2), happiness (MCZ-3) and anxiety (MCZ-4). The survey asks members of the public: • Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? (MCZ-1) • Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things you do in your life are worthwhile? (MCZ-2) • Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday? (MCZ-3) • Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday? (MCZ-4). The questions are answered on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is "not at all" and 10 is "completely". Sociodemographic variables of interest: • Gender: The results show that women have significantly lower satisfaction and happiness while higher sense of worthwhileness and higher anxiety levels. • Marital status: Our findings show that being in relationship (marriage or civil partnership) is a booster for all well-being measures where single individuals have statistically significant adverse wellbeing for the 3 measures (MCZ-1, MCZ-2 and MCZ-3). • Age: The results show that younger people are disadvantaged where older people in general people feel more satisfied, happier, more worthwhile age and less anxious. • Household size: During the pandemic household size is seen as a booster for wellbeing and not statistical significant for anxiety. • Education: Higher educational is normally associated with greater happiness and higher levels of SWB, other things being equal. However, in the pandemic the relationship between education and happiness may be more nuanced than this, and we are working on the statistical models to try and fully understand the effect of education on SWB and the MCZ-1 to MCZ-4. Results will be elaborated in the coming UKRI COVID-19 Monitoring survey and are research reports and outputs. • Employment: Unemployed people do suffer the most with their satisfaction levels, levels of happiness and their sense of worthwhileness. The results show statistically negative effects on wellbeing measures for people who lost their job due to the pandemic effect. • Disability: The results show that people with a disability report feeling less satisfied, less happy and say life is less worthwhile, and they report significantly higher levels of anxiety levels. • Income: People on higher incomes are significantly more likely to feel more satisfied and more happier but they are necessarily more likely to feel that life is worthwhile. Also higher income people have statistically higher levels of anxiety. • Health: People reporting poor health and health conditions are significantly worse off on all well-being measures. • Smoking: The well-being of people that smoke people are significantly affected during the pandemic, where the data show statistically the adverse effect of smoking for all measures of well-being. • Overweight: In general people who are overweight report statistically lower levels of satisfaction, happiness and say life is less worthwhileness and they report higher levels of anxiety. • Ethnicity: We cannot see consistent well-being effects for people of ethnic minority groups. However, people from Asian ethnic groups have statistically significant higher levels of anxiety, while people from Black and Chinese ethnic groups report higher feeling of worthwhileness, compared to the White British ethnic group. Our results are preliminary, and our initial findings require further investigation. • Region: London is consistently showing significantly lower levels of population well-being across all measures. People in London are the worst hit by the pandemic and the magnitude of the coefficient is relatively high. We also trace some positive well-being effects for people living in South East, South West, Scotland and Wales. We are currently working to understand more about the social impacts of the pandemic, and how they are unevenly distributed in the population. We are also looking at how inequalities intersect and interact in the data. We are currently examining the effects of the different lockdown measures on wellbeing, e.g. home schooling on wellbeing. We are establishing a pre-pandemic baseline in order to examine the pandemic/pre-pandemic effects in the survey data, considering the extent to which SWB in the pandemic fit does or does not fit normal expectations given what we know from previous research in the field. Further results will be elaborated in the coming UKRI COVID-19 Monitoring surveys, our research reports and conference paper and in academic articles. |
| Exploitation Route | It is too early to say at the moment how the outcomes of this funding may be taken forward and put to use by others, as we have only just completed the task of merging all of the OPN COVID-19 survey waves - some 50 OPN COVID-19 datasets accessed at the Office for National Statistics Secure Research Service. We are now in the data analysis stage of the project and we are developing our statistical models and we are sharing early results with our expert advisory group and we are consulting with them on our findings. |
| Sectors | Healthcare,Government, Democracy and Justice |