Abstract
Drawn from the stress process model, the pandemic has imposed substantial stress to individual economic and mental well-being and has brought unprecedented disruptions to social life. In light of social distancing measures, and in particular physical distancing because of lockdown policies, the use of digital technologies has been regarded as the alternative to maintain economic and social activities. This paper aims to describe the design and implementation of an online survey created as an urgent, international response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The online survey described here responds to the need of understanding the effects of the pandemic on social interactions/relations and to provide findings on the extent to which digital technology is being utilized by citizens across different communities and countries around the world. It also aims to analyze the association of use of digital technologies with psychological well-being and levels of loneliness. The data will be based on the ongoing survey (comprised of several existing and validated instruments on digital use, psychological well-being and loneliness), open for 3 months after roll out (ends September) across 11 countries (Austria, France, Germany, India, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Turkey, and UK). Participants include residents aged 18 years and older in the countries and snowball sampling is employed via social media platforms. We anticipate that the findings of the survey will provide useful and much needed information on the prevalence of use and intensities of digital technologies among different age groups, gender, socioeconomic groups in a comparative perspective. Moreover, we expect that the future analysis of the data collected will show that different types of digital technologies and intensities of use are associated with psychological well-being and loneliness. To conclude, these findings from the study are expected to bring in our understanding the role of digital technologies in affecting individual social and emotional connections during a crisis.
Highlights
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, is one of the worst pandemics in human history and in the last 100 years, on a global scale and has resulted in ∼21,294,845 (267,291—in the last 24 h) infected cases, and 761,799 deaths (5,985—in the last 24 h) (World Health Organization, 2020) with the statistics still on the rise
Of interest to this paper are two cross-country projects, one which consists of an online longitudinal study about older audiences in the digital media environments and another, Grannies on the Net, about the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in grandmothers’ interactions with close and distant social ties
While the aforementioned projects address issues related to the use and impact and appropriation of digital technology in people’s lives, this paper reports on a study that, addressing adjacent goals to those of the projects above, emerges in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic scenario
Summary
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, is one of the worst pandemics in human history and in the last 100 years, on a global scale and has resulted in ∼21,294,845 (267,291—in the last 24 h) infected cases, and 761,799 deaths (5,985—in the last 24 h) (World Health Organization, 2020) with the statistics still on the rise. There is a growing body of scholarly research relating to the impact of COVID-19 and citizens across different countries and continents This includes Ammar et al (2020a,b,c) who deployed an online survey in seven languages to understand how this pandemic was impacting on the daily living and lives of citizens in relation to social distancing, isolation and home confinement. Bentlage et al (2020) and Chtourou et al (2020) who are members of the same project have explored and provided practical recommendations for maintaining an active lifestyle and physical activity during the pandemic Such recommendations include exergaming, yoga, and home-based exercise, with appropriate amounts of intensity conducted for both adults and children. We anticipate the preliminary findings will provide an insight into the use of digital technologies and the impacts of using digital technologies on psychological well-being and loneliness
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