Social science research tracker, learning from past pandemics and the importance of effective risk communication

By Chris Burnage, Communications Manager, SAGE Publishing

As we all adjust to the new normal, things can’t and won’t simply revert to a pre-COVID-19 world. Here in the UK, we are only a few weeks into our new socially distant lives, blue Monday 2020 (January 18th) somehow doesn’t seem so depressing now. As Matt Reynolds of Wired has noted, ‘this is only the grim first act of the coronavirus crisis’.  With this in mind, it is extremely important that we hear from experts right across the academic spectrum.

From a research perspective the main coverage and focus in the press has been on the medical and biological response—and rightfully so—, the race for a vaccine, the manufacturing of ventilators and the need for more extensive testing, especially for frontline workers in the UK is crucial in the fight against the novel coronavirus. At SAGE Ocean we’ve focused on highlighting the computational work being done to map and model the threat of the coronavirus. The work done by Imperial College London was crucial in the UK government changing its approach to dealing with the outbreak. This has also been seen in the US with a network of teams from Northeastern, Columbia and Harvard along with Imperial creating models to advise the White House.

With a third of the world population under lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus, current containment measures look set to be in place for the majority of 2020. The longer the pandemic goes on, the more important social science and social scientists become in managing the social, political, economic and cultural upheaval that COVID-19 has thrust upon us all. Our journals team have built a free to access microsite featuring the latest medical research into COVID-19 published on SAGE Journals but also social and behavioral science insights into working, living and educating during a pandemic, effects on national and international infrastructure and how best to manage stress and anxiety.

Social science tracker

Last month Nathan Matias of Cornell University and Alex Leavitt of Facebook put together a tracker listing social science research about COVID-19. To date there are 178 entries for ongoing social research and pre-prints are already available. Projects range from what misinformation is being widely shared across social media, how platforms and governments can better protect gig economy workers and how public sentiment towards China might be changing when political leaders describe the coronavirus as the Chinese virus.

One study featured on the tracker is co-led by computational social scientists Soubhik Barari and Gary King from Harvard University and commissioned by the Italian government to address behavioral challenges around the pandemic. They did this via a nationally representative survey of 3,452 Italian adults between March 18th and March 20th, 2020. Soubhik lists three key takeaways from their findings:

1. Most people say they're strongly complying with the quarantine. Younger people slightly less, government skeptics slightly less.

2. Vulnerable (the elderly/infirm) actually have to leave the quarantine often, but for essential reasons— going to the pharmacy, groceries for dependents. They are also the MOST anxious group, not young people.

3. Informational nudges won't work ... because everyone gets the message. What we need now is not more information, but morale-boosting interventions to make the quarantine less damaging on mental health and even (dare I say) fun.

You can read the full report here.

Past pandemics and the importance of effective risk communication

How much has the response to COVID-19 been influenced by lessons of the past? Evidence from the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was clear that social distancing does work so why have certain countries been slow in getting this message across to citizens? Others such as Sweden have taken a much more relaxed approach. Academics writing in The Conversation have explained that it might be easier for Sweden to achieve herd immunity more quickly as they ‘do not have intensive mitigation or suppression strategies’. But going forward, Sweden is likely to have to impose stricter restrictions depending on how the virus spreads, especially in metropolitan areas’. After the Ebola crisis, Michael Baker, Deputy Director of Healthcare at Public Health England South East outlined five lessons we should have learned from pandemics—are we currently effectively managing risk communication in the UK?

The UK has seen constant changes in government messaging over the past few weeks making it much more difficult to achieve the social change needed to help solve this crisis. Dr. Lesley Henderson, a reader in sociology and communications in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at Brunel University London made this case last week. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the early 2000s, it was found that ‘some of the community-wide problems involving SARS might have been avoided with better communication by public health officials and clinicians’. A lack of transparency and uncertainty in communication has been found to cause a significant psychological toll for certain individuals, beyond the physical threat brought by the pandemic.

A literature review conducted by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in 2013 outlined that ‘risk communication on communicable diseases is still emerging though as the body of research lacks both rigorous empirical evidence and evaluation research on event-specific risk communication efforts, relying more instead on guidance documents, case study descriptions and theoretical insights on risk communication’. They found that:

• Theoretical models of risk communication must be integrated across disciplines.

• The bridge between academic research and risk communication in practice needs to be strengthened (that is, findings of research need to be better communicated to end users and built into risk communication planning, guidance documents, training modules).

• Risk communicators should be collaborating more closely with community-level health providers and media.

A social science tracker is hugely important for researchers, making it easier for them to collaborate and keep tabs on what other researchers are investigating as well as learn from lessons of the past. Add your project to the tracker to avoid the duplication of work and facilitate collaboration.