RAPID: Evaluating the Impact of COVID-19 on Labor Market, Social, and Mental Health Outcomes

Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences - This research project will advance understanding of the economic, social, and mental health toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic is quickly eroding the social and economic platform the world is built upon. Quality data must be gathered quickly in order to understand the impact of the pandemic on human life. This project will collect robust data on people's experiences in the U.S. during the pandemic, including data collected quickly via social media platforms. The project also will develop methodology to facilitate the effective use of different data sources. Because experiences both within the U.S. and across countries vary widely, the investigators will collaborate with researchers in five countries outside the U.S. By implementing the same measures of experienced outcomes in similar surveys across the globe, a unique comparison is possible about the effectiveness of the policies that have been implemented across countries. The project results will provide insights for academics, practitioners, and policy makers who are seeking to understand and inform policies to curb the pandemic and its consequences. Data collected by this project, links to other data, and project findings will be made available through dashboards for policy makers, researchers, and the interested public. The investigators will record podcasts and webinars to broadly disseminate the results. Graduate students will be trained in the conduct of collaborative multi-site research.

This project will leverage data collected as part of an ongoing tracking study of American households in the Understanding America Study. Survey data also will be collected via Facebook and Instagram. Research questions to be addressed by the data include: Which policies have helped to reduce anxiety and depression during this pandemic? Which individuals are at greatest risk for economic losses during the pandemic and what measures have helped them the most? How do these economic losses influence willingness to engage in social distancing, and which policies have helped people to stay at home in the face of economic losses? The project also will develop new survey weighting approaches to make use of the simultaneous collection of data with different sampling frames, sampling schemes, and modes. The availability of multiple data sources will allow for the assessment of measurement properties of mental health scales items in need of adaptations to rapidly changing environments. Methods will be developed for causal inference from data combined from different sources to assess the effects of different policy interventions by local areas, states, and countries.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.