COVID-Dynamic Longitudinal Study

Timeline of Real-World Events and COVID-Dynamic Wave Administrations.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a global catastrophe that caused widespread societal upheaval. However, it also presented a unique scientific opportunity to elucidate the dynamics of psychosocial processes under extreme and volatile conditions. To minimize future societal costs and ensure preparedness, my colleagues and I launched the COVID-Dynamic Longitudinal Study .

Our study features:

18 waves of data collection from April 2020 to December 2021.
A diverse sample of > 1,000 U.S. residents, varying in geographic location and age.
Hour-long assessments each wave, including standardized psychological surveys on emotion; social, political, and moral attitudes; COVID-19-related behaviors; and tasks measuring implicit attitudes and social decision-making. A sample survey is available for exploration here. All survey and task administration files are publicly available (questionnaires; tasks).
External data curated to contextualize participants’ responses including local COVID-19 cases and deaths, legal restrictions imposed to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, unemployment rates, and anti-racism political crowd events.
Pre-registration on the Open Science Framework website to ensure transparency.
Public sharing of de-identified data for the first 16 waves, along with comprehensive quality metrics and data dictionaries.
A web-based data explorer tool to provide researchers with an overview of the dataset.

Furthermore, I led a team of four undergraduates to curate a repository of over 500 COVID-related psychological studies and developed an interactive Bokeh visualization to help researchers identify relevant work. Details of these studies are available here. A snapshot of the plot is shown below (click here to view the interactive figure). To our knowledge, few—if any—other studies have captured a comparable breadth, sample size, testing frequency, and duration as ours.

A snapshot of the interactive figure. You can click the link above to view the whole interactive figure.

The first 16 waves of data have been publicly released and are described in detail in our data release paper (Rusch* et al., 2023) which has facilitated numerous research projects including my own work on the structure of emotions (details here). A catalog of these projects, which demonstrates the breadth of the dataset’s application, is available on our Research Projects page.

We designed the COVID-Dynamic study to serve as a lasting resource for researchers investigating both COVID-19-specific questions and basic psychological phenomena. We also hope it provides valuable insights for clinicians and policymakers seeking to mitigate the effects of future public health calamities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused enormous societal upheaval globally. In the US, beyond the devastating toll on life and health, it triggered an economic shock unseen since the great depression and laid bare preexisting societal inequities. The full impacts of these personal, social, economic, and public-health challenges will not be known for years. To minimize societal costs and ensure future preparedness, it is critical to record the psychological and social experiences of individuals during such periods of high societal volatility. Here, we introduce, describe, and assess the COVID-Dynamic dataset, a within-participant longitudinal study conducted from April 2020 through January 2021, that captures the COVID-19 pandemic experiences of >1000 US residents. Each of 16 timepoints combines standard psychological assessments with novel surveys of emotion, social/political/moral attitudes, COVID-19-related behaviors, tasks assessing implicit attitudes and social decision-making, and external data to contextualize participants’ responses. This dataset is a resource for researchers interested in COVID-19-specific questions and basic psychological phenomena, as well as clinicians and policy-makers looking to mitigate the effects of future calamities.

References

2023