The behavioral or “social distancing†response to the COVID-19 pandemic will largely determine the rate at which the virus spreads throughout the U.S. population. To encourage social distancing, many states have closed schools and nonessential businesses and instituted “Stay-at-Home†orders that limit trips to necessary activities such as grocery shopping and medical care. While Stay-at-Home orders are typically considered mandatory, most states rely on voluntary compliance rather than penalize infractions through citations or arrests. A persistent concern throughout the crisis has been the extent to which individuals are choosing to practice social distancing effectively in order to slow the growth of the pandemic. Yet, to date, virtually no systematic information has emerged on differences in social distancing across social groups by income, race/ethnicity, and residential neighborhood and, critically, why these differences exist. This project will address this gap by collecting detailed data on social distancing practices during the COVID-19 pandemic – including the timing and location of non-home trips over the course of a week – from a sample of youth and their caregivers in the Columbus, OH area. The study will build on an ongoing project focused on differences in patterns of everyday activity under normal (non-pandemic) conditions). Enhanced effectiveness of social distancing holds the potential to save millions of lives, reduce the burden to inevitably taxed health care systems during pandemics, and mitigate potential longer-term damage to the US and global economies due to ineffective pandemic containment. Findings from the project will provide crucial guidance to policy-makers who must target interventions to most effectively contain viral outbreaks and address the needs of the most vulnerable populations during pandemics. Findings will also provide important information for epidemiologists who must model disease spread based on realistic assumptions regarding social distancing practices across the population. Finally, clinicians will also benefit from more precise information on infection risk profiles at the individual level.
COVID-19 has prompted requirements for social-distancing, and yet we know little about who complies and who does not. This project will re-contact 246 households (N=309 youth) who participated in an ongoing NIH-funded study of everyday spatial exposures that was in the field in the period prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study). Objective 1 of the study will investigate the association between income, race/ethnicity, and residential neighborhood economic disadvantage and typical (pre-pandemic) exposure to higher infection risk locations as captured by the density of social interaction at those places. These data will shed light on infection risk during the early stages of the pandemic before social distancing behaviors were widely adopted. The study will leverage unique data from the baseline study on the geographic location and associated characteristics of everyday places visited based on a novel survey-based method for the collection of geographically-referenced activity data. Objective 2 of the study will re-administer this location data collection approach during the peak period of the pandemic to measure income, race/ethnicity and neighborhood variation in the extent of social distancing behaviors for both caregivers and youth. Objective 3 will address the consequences of pandemic exposure and social distancing behaviors for economic hardship, mental health, family conflict, and youth behavioral problems. The project will generate the first geographically referenced data on the mobility of youth and their caregivers during pandemics in combination with extensive, high quality social survey data. Findings will inform sociological theories regarding the social and geographic determinants of compliance behavior, which complement psychological investigations more attuned to personality and individual determinants of the same.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
