| Popis: |
Mitigation efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic have been unprecedented in their scope and duration. These efforts have included statewide “stay-at-home” recommendations, facemask mandates, and mandatory quarantines for those potentially exposed to the virus. An early rapid review of previous infectious disease outbreaks suggested that prior mandatory quarantines were associated with negative psychological outcomes, with stressors (e.g., fears, boredom, financial loss, length of restrictions) associated with worse outcomes (e.g., PTSD, anger) (Brooks et al., 2020). As a result, there has been widespread public debate in the United States over the mental health implications of COVID-19 mitigation efforts, which have varied dramatically by state over the course of the pandemic. Indeed, early research on the psychological responses to COVID-19 suggested that as the pandemic evolved, psychological distress increased (Holman, Thompson, Garfin, & Silver, 2020; Holingue et al., 2020), although perhaps not as dramatically as some had anticipated (Shevlin et al., 2020). Taken together, data thus far suggest that although COVID-19 has resulted in some elevation in psychological distress, many have exhibited striking psychological resiliency, in alignment with previous studies of adaptation to collective trauma (Silver & Garfin, 2016). That research offers clues to variables that may be more strongly associated with deleterious responses to COVID-19: direct personal (Holman et al., 2020; Garfin et al., 2014) and media-based COVID-19-related exposure (Garfin, Holman, & Silver, 2020). Much of the research on mental health during COVID-19 has relied on non-probability convenience/opt-in samples (see Holman et al., 2020) and self-report metrics of community exposure. Mental health data from representative, probability-based samples have not been combined with objective measures of community-based mitigation. Indeed, knowing someone who was sick or died, media exposure (cf. Garfin et al., 2020), or the severe mitigation efforts are all potential explanatory variables. Furthermore, it may be that the relationship between community-level variables and mental health differs across individuals with differing levels of direct exposure to the pandemic. Herein, we combine data from a longitudinal, nationally representative, probability-based sample of Americans with objective measures of mitigation stringency to test these relationships. This effort will juxtapose state-level mitigation efforts and case and death counts with person-level direct and media-based exposure to demonstrate which were most associated with psychological outcomes in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. |
