Methods

Methods

Translation procedure

The PsyCorona survey is available in 30 languages. The survey was developed in English, and it was translated to additional languages as the PsyCorona initiative grew. Because of the time pressure during the early phases of the pandemic to make the survey widely available and accessible to as many people as possible, we first included languages that were known by the initial team members, English, Dutch, German, Arabic, Italian, French, and Spanish. Further languages were added as researchers from different countries joined the project.

Ethics

This study complies with ethical regulations for research on human subjects and all participants gave informed consent, as approved by the Institutional Review Board at New York University Abu Dhabi (protocol HRPP-2020-42) and the Ethics Committee of Psychology at Groningen University (protocol PSY-1920-S-0390).

Participants

Over 60,000 respondents from all over the world completed the PsyCorona survey between March 19 and May 25, 2020. Approximately half participated as volunteers and half were recruited via paid panels.

1) Convenience samples. The survey was distributed online through a combination of convenience sampling, snowball sampling and paid procedures.

2) Nationally Representative samples. Paid online panels were used to supplement the self-selected responses in an effort to achieve national representativeness in key countries.

3) Weekly survey follow-ups. The main PsyCorona survey was cross-sectional, but at the end of the survey participants were invited to participate in a subsequent longitudinal survey. If they consented, they then received weekly follow-up surveys.

Data sharing procedure

Access to the data was centrally controlled and documented so that only a few members of the core team had access to the raw data. For further details, please see the Data tab.