Dataset Information

Perceptions and opinions on the COVID-19 pandemic in flanders, belgium: Data from a three-wave longitudinal study.

ABSTRACT: During the COVID-19 pandemic, people have become increasingly fearful of the disease as death tolls rise, while governments attempt to combat it by installing restrictive measures. News media play a vital role as they are the main sources from which people gather information regarding the disease and the public health measures. The present longitudinal data reflect a bird's eye view of people's fears towards getting ill, their news media consumption, and their attitudes regarding the (Belgian) government's handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Data were collected at three key moments in the pandemic among adults in Flanders, Belgium: in the middle of March (when the first restrictive measures went into effect; N = 1,000), early April (as hospital admissions and death toll peaked; N = 870), and at the end of May and beginning of June (as several measures were lifted or relaxed; N = 768). With only 23.2% drop-out across the three waves, these data may be of interest to researchers who wish to explore dynamics of fear and attitudes towards public health measures during this particularly challenging time.

SUBMITTER: De Coninck D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7376332 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Perceptions and opinions on the COVID-19 pandemic in flanders, belgium: Data from a three-wave longitudinal study.

De Coninck David D d'Haenens Leen L Matthijs Koen K

Data in brief 20200723

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people have become increasingly fearful of the disease as death tolls rise, while governments attempt to combat it by installing restrictive measures. News media play a vital role as they are the main sources from which people gather information regarding the disease and the public health measures. The present longitudinal data reflect a bird's eye view of people's fears towards getting ill, their news media consumption, and their attitudes regarding the (Belgian) g ...[more]

PMID: 32766413

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Project description:BackgroundDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, the CoMix study, a longitudinal behavioral survey, was designed to monitor social contacts and public awareness in multiple countries, including Belgium. As a longitudinal survey, it is vulnerable to participants' "survey fatigue", which may impact inferences.MethodsA negative binomial generalized additive model for location, scale, and shape (NBI GAMLSS) was adopted to estimate the number of contacts reported between age groups and to deal with under-reporting due to fatigue within the study. The dropout process was analyzed with first-order auto-regressive logistic regression to identify factors that influence dropout. Using the so-called next generation principle, we calculated the effect of under-reporting due to fatigue on estimating the reproduction number.ResultsFewer contacts were reported as people participated longer in the survey, which suggests under-reporting due to survey fatigue. Participant dropout is significantly affected by household size and age categories, but not significantly affected by the number of contacts reported in any of the two latest waves. This indicates covariate-dependent missing completely at random (MCAR) in the dropout pattern, when missing at random (MAR) is the alternative. However, we cannot rule out more complex mechanisms such as missing not at random (MNAR). Moreover, under-reporting due to fatigue is found to be consistent over time and implies a 15-30% reduction in both the number of contacts and the reproduction number ([Formula: see text]) ratio between correcting and not correcting for under-reporting. Lastly, we found that correcting for fatigue did not change the pattern of relative incidence between age groups also when considering age-specific heterogeneity in susceptibility and infectivity.ConclusionsCoMix data highlights the variability of contact patterns across age groups and time, revealing the mechanisms governing the spread/transmission of COVID-19/airborne diseases in the population. Although such longitudinal contact surveys are prone to the under-reporting due to participant fatigue and drop-out, we showed that these factors can be identified and corrected using NBI GAMLSS. This information can be used to improve the design of similar, future surveys.

Project description:"Watervogels - Wintering waterbirds in Flanders, Belgium" is a sampling event dataset published by the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). It contains more than 94,000 sampling events (site counts), covering over 710,000 species observations (and zero counts when there is no associated occurrence) and 36 million individual birds for the period 1991-2016. The dataset includes information on 167 different species in nearly 1,100 wetland sites. The aim of these bird counts is to gather information on the size, distribution, and long-term trends of wintering waterbird populations in Flanders. These data are also used to assess the importance of individual sites for waterbirds, using quantitative criteria. Furthermore, the waterbird counts contribute to international monitoring programs, such as the International Waterbird Census (coordinated by Wetlands International) and fulfil some of the objectives of the European Bird Directive, the Ramsar Convention, and the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA). Here the dataset is published as a standardized Darwin Core Archive and includes for each event: a stable event ID, date and location of observation and a short description of the sampling protocol, effort and conditions (in the event core), supplemented with specific information for each occurrence: a stable occurrence ID, the scientific name and higher classification of the observed species, the number of recorded individuals, and a reference to the observer of the record (in the occurrence extension). Issues with the dataset can be reported at https://github.com/inbo/data-publication/issues. The following information is not included in this dataset and available upon request: roost site counts, counts from historical (inactive) locations and counts from before 1991. We have released this dataset to the public domain under a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). We would appreciate it if you follow the INBO norms for data use (https://www.inbo.be/en/norms-data-use) when using the data. If you have any questions regarding this dataset, do not hesitate to contact us via the contact information provided in the metadata or via opendata@inbo.be.

Dataset Information

Perceptions and opinions on the COVID-19 pandemic in flanders, belgium: Data from a three-wave longitudinal study.

Publications

Perceptions and opinions on the COVID-19 pandemic in flanders, belgium: Data from a three-wave longitudinal study.

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