Dataset Information

Couples' changing work patterns in the United Kingdom and the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT: Going beyond a focus on individual-level employment outcomes, we investigate couples' changing work patterns in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing longitudinal panels of 2186 couples from the Understanding Society COVID-19 Survey (UK) and 2718 couples from the Current Population Survey (US), we assess whether the pandemic has elevated the importance of human capital vis-à-vis traditional gender specialization in shaping couples' work patterns. The UK witnessed a notable increase in sole-worker families with the better-educated partner working, irrespective of gender. The impact of the pandemic was similar but weaker in the US. In both countries, couples at the bottom 25% of the prepandemic family income distribution experienced the greatest increase in neither partner working but the least growth in sole-worker arrangements. Through a couple-level analysis of changing employment patterns, this study highlights the importance of human capital in shaping couples' paid-work organization during the pandemic, and it reveals the socioeconomic gradient in such organization.

SUBMITTER: Qian Y

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8250666 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Couples' changing work patterns in the United Kingdom and the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Qian Yue Y Hu Yang Y

Gender, work, and organization 20210331 Suppl 2

Going beyond a focus on individual-level employment outcomes, we investigate couples' changing work patterns in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing longitudinal panels of 2186 couples from the Understanding Society COVID-19 Survey (UK) and 2718 couples from the Current Population Survey (US), we assess whether the pandemic has elevated the importance of human capital vis-à-vis traditional gender specialization in shaping couples' work patter ...[more]

PMID: 34230781

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Project description:RationaleTracking the trajectory of people's emotional and behavioral reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic sheds light on how people cope with the emerging crisis, evaluates the impact of emotional reactions on preventive behaviors, and provides insights into how preventive behaviors can be encouraged and maintained in the long term.ObjectiveWe addressed two related questions: How did emotions change across various stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to what extent were preventive behaviors predicted by emotional reactions and information acquisition?MethodsWe conducted a four-wave longitudinal study in the United States and China across four stages of the pandemic: prepandemic, onset of viral outbreak, ongoing risk, and contained risk. We measured emotions, life satisfaction, preventive behaviors, acquisition of COVID-19 related information, and risk perceptions. We used the Emotional Recall Task (ERT) to investigate people's emotions. By allowing people to describe their emotional experience in their own words, the ERT evaluates each individual based on emotions relevant to their personal experience, making it more suitable for a wider range of contexts and social groups.ResultsBoredom, anxiety, fear, and worry were common emotional reactions to the pandemic as it emerged. Surprisingly, participants' emotional experience did not mirror infection and death rates: Instead of negative emotions growing as the virus spread, emotions soon reverted back to normality. This pattern held regardless of whether the viral spread was contained. Consequently, people's preventive behaviors were predicted by fear, anxiety, and worry only at the onset of the viral outbreak. In contrast, actively acquiring information and knowledge about COVID-19 had a more enduring effect on the engagement of preventive behaviors in both countries.ConclusionOur research suggests a possible life cycle of emotional reactions towards a pandemic and highlights the importance of people acquiring information and knowledge about the threat in containing its spread.

Project description:BackgroundSince COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, the disease has had an unprecedented impact worldwide. Social media such as Reddit can serve as a resource for enhancing situational awareness, particularly regarding monitoring public attitudes and behavior during the crisis. Insights gained can then be utilized to better understand public attitudes and behaviors during the COVID-19 crisis, and to support communication and health-promotion messaging.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to compare public attitudes toward the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic across four predominantly English-speaking countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia) using data derived from the social media platform Reddit.MethodsWe utilized a topic modeling natural language processing method (more specifically latent Dirichlet allocation). Topic modeling is a popular unsupervised learning technique that can be used to automatically infer topics (ie, semantically related categories) from a large corpus of text. We derived our data from six country-specific, COVID-19-related subreddits (r/CoronavirusAustralia, r/CoronavirusDownunder, r/CoronavirusCanada, r/CanadaCoronavirus, r/CoronavirusUK, and r/coronavirusus). We used topic modeling methods to investigate and compare topics of concern for each country.ResultsOur consolidated Reddit data set consisted of 84,229 initiating posts and 1,094,853 associated comments collected between February and November 2020 for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The volume of posting in COVID-19-related subreddits declined consistently across all four countries during the study period (February 2020 to November 2020). During lockdown events, the volume of posts peaked. The UK and Australian subreddits contained much more evidence-based policy discussion than the US or Canadian subreddits.ConclusionsThis study provides evidence to support the contention that there are key differences between salient topics discussed across the four countries on the Reddit platform. Further, our approach indicates that Reddit data have the potential to provide insights not readily apparent in survey-based approaches.

Dataset Information

Couples' changing work patterns in the United Kingdom and the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Publications

Couples' changing work patterns in the United Kingdom and the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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