Surveys in Covid-19 and Post Covid-19 Days

Abstract

The year 2020 has been an extraordinary year, with the emergence of a global pandemic caused by the highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 virus. The World Health Organization declared the pandemic on March 11, 2020, and since then, the virus has spread everywhere, causing deaths, health system capacity overloads, job loss, the introduction of non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing, lockdowns, closing of schools, distance working, and many other developments and changes that came into life rapidly. These changes to the “normal” life we know introduced the necessity of data and research to answer all sorts of questions asked by researchers and policymakers. How much of the population was infected; what were the consequences of the pandemic on people in terms of their physical health, mental health, education, working status, financial situation, family arrangements, social interactions; how are people’s attitudes and behaviors regarding different dimensions of the pandemic, such as compliance with preventive measures, people’s concerns over the pandemic, their future evaluations, the evaluations of politicians and institutions in handling the situation, and so on. Survey research is among the top sources for finding answers to the questions stated above and has also been affected by the pandemic. With in-person contact being the main route of transmission of COVID-19, visiting households, for instance, has become very risky for both respondents and interviewers, and such household surveys have been suspended almost everywhere. As the case in many office jobs, telephone interviewing from CATI centers have also become risky for disease spread. With service sector interruptions, postal services for mail surveys, and even online support services for any web surveys became affected. However, the need for data was real and urgent, so there have been new surveys designed, mode switches have been employed for surveys already running or planned, and usage of other data sources has been more on the forefront. Survey researchers have been discussing these issues since early on in the pandemic. The European Survey Research Association’s journal, Survey Research Methods, published an extensive special issue in June, covering papers about design proposals, adaptions to ongoing surveys, and research initiatives. The World Population Association organized public webinars covering the challenges to surveys all around the world, with researchers attending from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America. In addition, the American Association for Public Opinion Research held workshops, and The Royal Statistics Society held two webinars on how the pandemic affected data collection from various aspects. The United Nations World Data Forum held a special session on the topic. International organizations have also been active in guiding survey organizations. A Task Force was founded under the UN Intersecretariat Working Group on Household Surveys. Pandemic related recommendations and briefs from UN agencies, such as the World Bank, UNICEF, UN Women, ILO, UNSD, and their regional offices. The World Health Organization and EUROSTAT have also provided documents for international use. In this project, we reviewed the developments in survey research based on similarsources listed above and survey organizations’ websites, with the aim of putting contemporary and future topics into perspective. Our desktop research covered the period from the pandemic’s beginning to midDecember 2020. We should underline that we do not cover all developments, and our review is limited to relatively more visible sources such as those above and those in English and Turkish. 2 To help with our understanding of issues, we decided to conduct expert interviews. We prepared separate interview guidelines for each expert, covering a wide range of topics overall while directing questions on each researcher’s area of expertise. We conducted a total of six interviews between September 25 and November 20. We asked Prof. James M. Lepkowski, Emeritus Professor at the Survey Methodology Program, University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, general questions about the effects of the pandemic on various modes and their implications for survey errors. Dr. Attila Hancıoğlu, the chief of the Data Collection Unit, Data & Analytic Section at the UNICEF Headquarters in New York, talked about the UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys program in the context of the pandemic. In our interview with Dr. Raphael Nishimura, the Director of Sampling in Survey Research Operations at the University of Michigan, he told us about his experience with household surveys from Brazil and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. We asked Prof. Frauke Kreuter, the Director of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland and Founder of the International Program for Survey and Data Science at the University of Mannheim, about more contemporary topics in survey research, such as web surveys and the use of big data. We also aimed to have a country-highlight, both in our desktop research and interviews. Enver Taştı, a senior expert and former-Deputy Director of TURKSTAT, shed light on the practices of TURKSTAT during the pandemic. Finally, our interview with Oğuzhan Akyıldırım, CEO of Tandans research company, reflected on the experiences of the private research sector in Turkey. This publication is aimed at the general reader, anyone who has an interest in surveys. For this purpose, we start with a background section that provides a historical background for surveys. We then move on to types of surveys based on different classifications. We have separate subsections on survey modes since they lie at the heart of many discussions mentioned in this publication. We talk about some international survey programs to introduce the readers to well-known survey series, with a special focus on Turkey. Overall, we introduce the basic concepts and terminology for readers from outside the field to prepare the sections ahead. Chapter 3 presents our review of online resources about the pandemic and surveys in the following section. Here we summarized our review separately for cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys. We also mentioned surveys designed specifically to focus on the impacts of the pandemic on various aspects of people’s lives while classifying them based on the type of sampling frame they used. We briefly reviewed some innovations in data collection deemed important during the pandemic. We allocated a brief section on surveys to estimate the extent of the spread of COVID-19 is and another on survey research in Turkey. We concluded with a short section on several ethical issues discussed by the researchers in their studies during this extraordinary period. In Chapter 4, we present the transcriptions of the interviews conducted with the experts presented above. The video recordings of these interviews are available on our Institute’s YouTube channel for those interested. We conclude our research and interviews in Chapter 5. In that section, we summarize our general conclusions and support them with observations from Chapter 3 and quotations from our expert interviews.