Jun 23, 2020
COVID-19 study data now publicly available
By Matthew Ballew, Parrish Bergquist, Matthew Goldberg, Abel Gustafson, John Kotcher, Jennifer Marlon, Seth Rosenthal, Edward Maibach and Anthony Leiserowitz
Over the past few months, we retooled our knowledge factory to investigate Americans’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We reported key findings from our research in a series of reports, including one about knowledge, attitudes, vulnerabilities, protective behaviors, and communication needs, one about people’s risk perceptions and emotional responses to the pandemic, and another about people’s trust in various sources for information about COVID-19. We have also published a peer-reviewed article showing that the CDC recommendation to wear masks led to a large and immediate increase in reported mask wearing (+12 percentage points), especially among people who strongly trust infectious disease experts (+17 points).
We are currently working on additional scholarly papers, including one investigating the role of social norms among friends and family in encouraging preventive behaviors, one about socio-demographic differences in preventive behaviors, and another mapping public support for voting by mail across the country. We will keep you informed with the latest findings that come from these projects.
To facilitate additional new research with the data, we are pleased to announce the public release of the dataset and survey materials, which are now available on the Open Science Framework. We hope the data will be useful for scholars and practitioners that aim to deepen their understanding of Americans’ responses to the pandemic, and inform additional research as the pandemic evolves.