Promoting a nationwide collective response: lessons from the Social Activity Measure during the COVID-19 pandemic

This report makes use of a unique data-set, the Social Activity Measure (SAM), which was collected fortnightly over an 18-month period during the COVID-19 pandemic from January 2021 to June 2022. The aim of the analysis presented is to derive lessons for any future situations where the Government (and society more broadly) faces a situation that demands coordinated, national collective action, in the face of a threat.

SAM adapted an established psychological method, the Day Reconstruction Method, to record people’s daily behaviour in detail, together with their background characteristics and a range of psychological variables designed to measure their perceptions of the pandemic and attitudes towards it. The study was administered anonymously, online, to a nationally representative sample of 1,000 people in Ireland every two weeks.

The data consist of 36,000 surveys completed by over 8,000 different adults, who were recruited through two pre-existing online panels of survey respondents. The methods for constructing online survey panels entail possible selection effects, so two different panels were alternated over the 18-month period and cross-checks for consistency undertaken. Controls were also introduced to account for possible effects of repeat responding.