Ethical compliance
Our study protocol has been approved by both Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Institutional Review Board. Participants were informed that their participation is voluntary and their responses will be shared anonymously. Online consent was obtained from all respondents who took part in the survey.
Question of survival
The data was collected through an extensive online survey with over 120 questions. The survey questions can be roughly divided into three categories: (1) retrospective questions focusing on the period before COVID-19, (2) questions about the period during COVID-19, and (3) prospective questions about respondents’ expectations for one future period in which COVID-19 is no longer a threat. The questions cover a variety of topics, including commuting habits, free travel choices, work-related questions, study-related questions, shopping, eating, etc. – all before, during, and after the pandemic.
The survey questions can be broken down into eight categories based on the nature of the question, namely: demographics, work, study, shopping and eating, transportation, and general attitudes. table 1 describes each of these categories.
Table 1 Description of the survey sections.
Survey Recruitment
From April to mid-June 2020, first wave 1A responses were collected from a convenience sample via mailing lists, social media appearances and mainstream media articles. A total of 1,110 responses were collected in this phase.
Beginning in late June, Wave 1B, the modified version of the survey, was delivered through survey invitations sent to a random email list purchased from a data marketing company. The list contained 350,000 email addresses from people in 24 metropolitan areas in the United States and the state of Ohio (see Fig. 1). We bought 100,000 additional email addresses from randomly selected people from across the country, including rural areas and excluding the areas covered by the first 350,000 emails. A total of 1,116 replies were received from the email list. Unfortunately, large email service providers have quickly started marking our survey invitations as spam, while some smaller providers have not. Although we took several steps to resolve this issue including changing the wording of the emails and changing the source of the emails (a uic.edu, asu.edu, or covidfuture.org email Address), we ultimately couldn’t fully solve this problem and saw a lower response rate from people with addresses from major email providers.
Distribution of survey participants by country of residence for survey data set version 1.0. Alaska and Hawaii are in the same weight class as California, Oregon, and Washington.
Survey invitation emails were also sent to an additional list of approximately 39,000 greater Phoenix email addresses that were purchased for a previous survey22nd. This list resulted in 782 answers. The survey invitation emails were sent through Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Qualtrics platform. One in 20 respondents invited through the email addresses they purchased received a $ 10 gift card reward. Respondents also had the option to donate their survey incentive to a charity. Invitees received two reminders as part of an effort to maximize response rates.
An additional 5,250 responses to Wave 1B’s survey were collected through a Qualtrics online panel. Qualtrics recruits these respondents from a variety of panels maintained by other companies and uses quota sampling to recruit respondents who are demographically representative of the country. Qualtrics’ quotas were set to collect information from 20 U.S. metropolitan areas that largely match the metropolitan areas from the purchased email list, as well as Ohio, Utah, North Carolina, New York state, and rural areas Areas. In order to obtain samples representing the population in each of the selected regions, quotas were set in the subsample of the Qualtrics online panel to ensure a representation based on income, age, race and ethnicity, and education. We asked all respondents to provide their email addresses in order to contact them again for subsequent waves of surveys. Because Qualtrics respondents are professional survey respondents, we have made most of the questions mandatory and included attentional testing questions that have been shown to improve the quality of responses23.
The distribution of the responses by region and the metropolitan areas mentioned are shown in Fig. 1. Illustration 2 shows the distribution of responses by recruitment method, available in the “org” variable in the data set. The geographic targets were selected based on the geographic and metropolitan size diversity and the state of the virus spread in May 2020.
Fig. 2
Distribution of the data set by source (from the survey data set version 1.0).
Illustration 1 shows the distribution of survey participants in the United States (50 states and the District of Columbia). Following our recruiting strategy, more and more responses are coming from larger and more urban federal states. Arizona is overrepresented in email delivery due to the majority of Arizona respondents. The respondents in the first Wave 1A sample are also more likely to be from Arizona, as the Arizona State University survey team’s network is heavily based in Arizona. When the data is weighted, all geographic discrepancies are controlled at the census department level and the overrepresentation of Arizona is controlled / corrected separately.
Additional waves of surveys
In order to observe how people’s attitudes and behaviors develop, the survey participants will be contacted again in spring and autumn 2021 with at least two shorter follow-up surveys every four months.
