A longitudinal mixed-methods population study of the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic: Psychological and social adjustment to a global threat
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Sheffield
Department Name: Psychology
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented global restrictions on freedom of movement, social and economic activity. Pandemics may cause fear in the population, affecting behaviour which in turn may propagate or restrict the further spread of the virus. Social and economic restrictions may also have a major impact on population mental health, especially affecting vulnerable groups, influencing the nation's ability to recover once the pandemic is over. To investigate these mental health effects, it is necessary to collect data using validated measures capturing mental health and decision-making early and throughout the pandemic. Prior to our work leading to this application, no research has addressed this. With initial seed funding from the Universities of Sheffield and Ulster, we assessed mental health and other relevant variables in 2025 UK adults who are highly representative of the UK population in the week of March 23rd, and followed them up in a second wave between April 20th and 30th, with a 69% follow-up rate. We measured not only mental health but many other social and Our work is already being used by the Cabinet Office, Public Health England and the Department of Health and Social Care. We request funding for five further waves of data collection (including one wave of increased sampling to ensure that the four nations/provinces of the UK are fully represented). We also seek funding for more detailed investigations of subgroups within our sample using qualitative interviews of vulnerable people (e.g. older people, people with pre-existing medical conditions) conducted over the telephone, cognitive testing of decision-making processes relevant to the perception of infection risk, and momentary experience sampling (in which people are contact at random intervals throughout the day to ask them about their experiences and feelings) extending until March 2021 after the hoped-for end of the crisis. We will achieve a complete picture of the psychology of a country during crisis and release our findings to the public and government in a timely manner, and make the data available to other scientists.
Publications
Bennett KM
(2023)
Predicting resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United Kingdom: Cross-sectional and longitudinal results.
in PloS one
Bentall R
(2023)
The emotional consequences of novel political identities: Brexit and mental health in the United Kingdom
in Political Psychology
Butter S
(2021)
Modelling the complexity of pandemic-related lifestyle quality change and mental health: an analysis of a nationally representative UK general population sample
in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology
Derrer-Merk E
(2022)
Belongingness challenged: Exploring the impact on older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic.
in PloS one
Derrer-Merk E
(2022)
Older people's family relationships in disequilibrium during the COVID-19 pandemic. What really matters?
in Ageing and Society
Gibson Miller J
(2020)
Capability, opportunity, and motivation to enact hygienic practices in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United Kingdom.
in British journal of health psychology
Gibson-Miller J
(2022)
A network approach to understanding social distancing behaviour during the first UK lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic.
in Psychology & health
Hartman T
(2021)
Different Conspiracy Theories Have Different Psychological and Social Determinants: Comparison of Three Theories About the Origins of the COVID-19 Virus in a Representative Sample of the UK Population
in Frontiers in Political Science
Hartman T
(2021)
The Authoritarian Dynamic During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Effects on Nationalism and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment
in Social Psychological and Personality Science
| Description | This award allowed researchers in the Covid 19 Psychological Research Consortium (which originally consisted of researchers at Sheffield and Ulster Universities but which has since expanded to include researches from UCL, Royal Holloway and Bedford and Liverpool University) to continue an already intitiated project to monitor the mental health of the UK population during the coronavirus pandemic. Two online survey waves with an initial representative sample of N = 2025 in the last week of March and the last week of April 2020 (spanning the first month of lockdown) were conducted before the award and these have been followed by six further waves to date, in August 2020, December 2020, March 2021, September 2021 and December 2021 and April 2022; with funds provided from our universities we are planning a further wave in March 2023 to coincide with the third anniversary of the first lockdown in 2020; we believe that this will make us the longest longitudinal study of the impact of the pandemic conducted in the UK or elsewhere. Where we have experienced sample attrition we have recruited replacement participants and, following advice from ESRC, we decided to further expand our sample in the fourth and fifth waves to N = 3,600 by oversampling from the devolved regions (Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales) which our initial sampling frame did not adequately capture. At the time of writing, just over 4,500 people have taken part in at least one wave of the survey. We have therefore created a rich longitudinal dataset that covers not only mental health but also numerous other social impacts of the pandemic, including political attitudes, social behaviour, beliefs about the origins of the pandemic, and attitudes towards vaccines. Considerable effort has been directed into the cleaning and merging of the survey waves and the creation of survey weights in order to ensure that accurate inferences can be made when comparing waves, and in the creation of documentation so that the dataset can be shared using the UK Data Archive, where the first 6 waves are now archived. Because of the need for timely information, we released all our reports during the first two years and draft papers on our project webpage. We have so far conducted detailed analyses of mental health data from the first five waves, covering the first year of the pandemic, and are will conduct a three year analysis after the next wave. Longitudinally, we have found an initial increase in depression and anxiety immediately after the introduction of the first lockdown in March 2020, but this was followed by the mental health variables returning to pre-pandemic levels. However, we have also found that this overall picture has masked a range of responses to the pandemic. Latent growth models revealed that, between the end of March and the end of July 2020, five separate mental health trajectories could be discerned in the UK population. On our depression and anxiety measures, the majority of the population (56.5%) have been resilient, showing no evidence of mental illness at any time. There was a small group of people who have been unwell throughout (6.5%), some who have deteriorated after starting with low (17%) or moderate symptoms (11.5%) and some who have shown considerable improvement in their mental health (8.5%; this latter group shows that the social changes associated with the pandemic may have been beneficial for some). From July 2020 until March 2021, the mental health of these groups stabilized so that those who had shown mental health losses sustained those losses and those who showed mental health gains sustained those gains. We have used more sophisticated statistical methods to try and identify the drivers of change in mental health in the groups affects. Broadly, it seems that those who had mental health difficulties before the pandemic, who are front-line workers (including workers in the food industry such as supermarket staff), who are in early adulthood and especially women with small children at home have been adversely affected, but that economic challenges of the pandemic (loss of job security or income) have particularly provoked anxiety symptoms. At the population level, we see little evidence that fear of the virus has impacted on mental health but it has had a positive impact in terms of being associated with compliance with social distancing rules. With regard to attitudes towards vaccines, we have found that negative attitudes are associated with conspiracy theories about the origins of the pandemic. We have also found that right-wing authoritarian personality traits (which have previously been closely studied by political psychologists) interact with anxiety about the pandemic to predict hostility towards migrants (supporting the hypothesis that these traits are associated with a tendency to direct hostility towards outgroups when threats are experienced). Using cognitive measures sent out to a subsample of the participants we have shown that delay discounting predicts adherence to social distancing measures. We have also published findings from telephone qualitative interviews conducted with subsamples of our participants, and comparing the findings with those from a similar study carried out in Colombia. These studies have explored how the pandemic challenged the sense of 'belonging' for older adults. The study has generated data that provide numerous opportunities to explore other aspects of human psychology and life in Britain. Hence, we have conducted a number of analyses of the role of trust in paranoia and conspiracy beliefs, attitudes towards relations with the European Union in post-Brexit Britain, the impact of Brexit on mental health, and the structure of political ideologies (left-right and authoritarian). These studies have either been published in peer-review journals (in the case of paranoia), published on the LSE website in the case of the Brexit-related analyses, or are under review at the time of writing. We expect a many more outputs from the study, given that the data has many potential uses other than addressing the mental health impact of the pandemic. |
| Exploitation Route | We have made our data available to other researchers via the UK Data Archive. We believe that our findings will be highly informative to policymakers planning for future pandemics and national emergencies and have continued to liaise with the UK Department of Health and Social Care. We believe that we have established a unique longitudinal psychological dataset which, if extended, would provide opportunities to assess the impact of the numerous challenges currently facing the UK (the cost of living crisis, ideological divisions relating to Brexit) and we are currently exploring opportunities for further funding for this purpose. |
| Sectors | Healthcare,Government, Democracy and Justice |
| URL | https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/psychology-consortium-covid19 |
| Description | Our findings have contributed to the efforts of government (Public Health England and the Department of Health and Social Care) to understand how the pandemic has impacted on the mental health and social behaviour of the UK population. During first lockdown we had considerable discussion with officials from PHE and DHSC about these issues and we have been making our ongoing reports available to them. We have continued to liaise with DHSC about the utility of our dataset for analysing other challenges facing the UK population and, on their advice, our next, 9th wave, scheduled to coincide with the third anniversary of the first lockdown in 2020, will have a focus on the cost-of-living crisis. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2020 |
| Sector | Healthcare,Government, Democracy and Justice |
| Title | The COVID-19 Psychological Research Consortium Study, 2020-2021. [data collection]. |
| Description | This dataset contains full anonymized data from the first six waves of our longitudinal survey of a quota sample (stratified by age, sex, and household income) of the Covid-19 Psychological Research Consortium study of the impact of the COVID pandemic on the UK population. Wave 1 began data collection on March 23rd 2020, with 2025 participants. Participants lost in subsequent waves have been replaced. Data includes a wide range of mental health outcomes (depression, anxiety and PTSD symptoms at every wave), self-reported behaviours (e.g. social distancing), political attitudes and a wide range of psychological, social and economic variables. Further waves of data will be added and linked (at present the intention is to complete 9 waves, ending in July 2022). |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Academic outputs from this study are listed in the relevant section of the Researchfish entry. |
| URL | https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=855552 |
| Description | Public Health England collaboration with the Covid-19 Psychological Researcg Consortium |
| Organisation | Public Health England |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | Duriung the first lockdown we provided timely reports to PHE about the mental health impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on the UK population and have forwarded to PHE all of our outputs. |
| Collaborator Contribution | A member of PHE has attended some of our research team meetings in 2020 and made suggestions about items and topics we could cover in our survey waves. However, this input reduced in the second part of 2020, possibly due to controversies about whether PHE would continue to exist in its present form or be replaced by a new institution. |
| Impact | There have been no joint reports from this collaboration. |
| Start Year | 2020 |
| Description | Guardian newspaper article: Has the pandemic really caused a 'tsunami' of mental health problems? published on February 9th 2021 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The PI Richard Bentall wrote an article for the Guardian newspaper about the research, challenging misunderstandings about the mental health impact of the pandemic. The article, titled "Has the pandemic really caused a 'tsunami' of mental health problems?" was published on 9th February 2021. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/09/pandemic-mental-health-problems-research-coron... |