Thoughts on COVID-19 research RE: psychological impact of lockdown.

My interpretation of data I've seen: unless we focus on vulnerable groups (e.g., those w mental health conditions), it looks like people seem to be hanging on OK(???)

Below is list of data that I've looked at:

Week 4 report of an ongoing study led by @Daisy_Fancourt shows daily fluctuation of different well-being and ill-being outcomes. There has not been much change in life satisfaction and loneliness within the first 4 weeks of lockdown: https://www.marchnetwork.org/research 

Another preprint that just came out by @EikoFried also suggests that his sample of undergraduate students (n = 80) in the Netherlands seem to also be doing fine in the past weeks: https://twitter.com/EikoFried/status/1253635712823549952?s=20

Finally, data from the Office for National Statistic shows mean of anxiety of >1000 GB respondents at 4.9 out of 0-10 point scale (CI 95% = [4.7, 5.1] (i.e., “Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?”). See more data here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandwellbeing/datasets/coronavirusandthesocialimpactsongreatbritaindata

I am also running COVID-19 studies at the moment, one currently under review w Netta Weinstein @SOARinSolitude and one w @TongZoeyZhou to collect data from Wuhan.

Reports of ongoing studies are helpful to help us navigate meaningful effect sizes of interest for our studies.

One helpful article for me to think about meaningful effect sizes of interest is a preprint by @farid_anvari and @lakens: https://psyarxiv.com/syp5a/