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Category: Project

Description: Because the COVID-19 situation requires substantial changes in human behaviour and creates significant burdens on individuals’ daily life, insights from behavioural sciences should be of immense value for epidemiologists, public health experts, policymakers, or other authorities in order to make evidence-driven decisions. The real value of such information is, unfortunately, often underestimated. Only a relatively small fraction of the research attempts to map COVID-related behaviours and trends in the consequences of the pandemic from a pragmatic and generalizable viewpoint. The dearth of complex representative data on these issues makes it difficult to implement evidence-based policies or to build reliable prognostic models. The proposed project, therefore, aims (1) to examine the explicit behaviours related to the pandemic and their psychological/sociological correlates, allowing thus to unfold the structure of the actual adherence to regulations; (2) to examine post-COVID-19 trends in mental health, social relationships, economic well-being, and overall quality of life in time. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide both the general public and authorities with a set of valid, complex, and representative behavioural data and reports. This would substantially increase the effectiveness of tackling this pandemic and its consequences and would help in creating better-prepared strategies for crisis prevention and management. As we embrace open science practices, all materials, data, and outputs of the project will be freely available, which guarantees the sustainability and the importance of this project even long after the current COVID-19 crisis.