Aims of the research

This project aims to understand the UK public experiences of and attitudes towards the coronavirus pandemic. We hope to be able to:

Understand changes in COVID-19 protection and transmission-prevention behaviours (e.g. improved hygiene, social distancing) over time.
Understand better the public’s general illness behaviour and how that has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic over time (e.g. self-management of long-term conditions such as diabetes and cardio-vascular disease, healthcare use)
Understand changes in lifestyle behaviours over time (e.g. smoking, alcohol, diet, physical activity, social interaction)
Identify the psychological and social drivers of these behaviours
Create a model for interventions that aim to minimise harm from the coronavirus across the population, focusing on supporting people with protecting themselves from infection, reducing the risk of transmission of the infection to others, and looking after their general health and well-being.
Identify pre-pandemic predictors of health behaviours using data linkage with HealthWise Wales data on lifestyle, resilience, well-being, and neighbourhoods.

Background to the research

The current coronavirus outbreak is taking us into new territory due to its novelty, infectiousness, mortality rates, combined with dense populations in urban environments and the ease of both short and long-distance travel in the current day. It is important to understand public perceptions of government responses to pandemics so that they can be incorporated into planning responses to current and future viral threats.

Behavioural factors have a major influence on the spread of pandemics and the success of containment and delay strategies. While there will be valuable learning from previous pandemics, it is vital that we understand beliefs and behavioural responses within the context of this current outbreak in the U.K population. This will help us understand how best to minimise harm across the whole population and develop public health messages in future pandemics.

Ethics

This project has been approved by the Cardiff School of Sport and Health Sciences Ethical Committee (Reference Sta-2760 and Sta-2707)

Public involvement

We have a multi-disciplinary stakeholder group who will be involved throughout the project. We have two public representatives as part of our team.

Dissemination (sharing our findings)

We will produce academic reports and will publish the study findings in academic journals. We will work with our patient partner and stakeholders to produce public facing summaries of our findings, which will be distributed via social media.

How we protect participants’ privacy

Everyone working on the study will respect participant privacy. We have taken very careful steps to make sure that participants cannot be identified from survey or interview responses. All data will be anonymised by the removal of all potentially identifiable information (e.g. names, places etc).

All personal data will be processed according in line with Article 6(1) and Article 9 (2) (a) of the General Data Protection Regulation 2018.

If you have taken part in the study and would like to withdraw from the study after providing contact details please contact the School Research and Innovation Support Office at Cardiff Metropolitan University (cshsresoffice@cardiffmet.ac.uk).

Funding

We have recently been awarded a grant for £102,279 from Sêr Cymru to help us speed up our data analysis, get findings out to you more quickly & work with HealthWiseWales to link up some of our data. Additionally, we have received some initial start-up funds from Cardiff Metropolitan University (£1,750). Prior to this funding our team were conducting this study as part of their academic roles, with the support of their institution.

Coronavirus COVID-19 UK Public Experiences (COPE) study