The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered daily life across the world. Researchers and the broader public worry that these changes in routine, employment, and social engagement will have an array of negative effects on health and wellbeing, with some referring to the pandemic as ushering in a “social recession”, marked by increasing isolation and loneliness. The extent to which these concerns are valid, and for whom, remains an expanding and valuable area of research. Yet, partly due to the challenges of measuring time use effectively, little research has precisely measured broad aspects of daily life throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In this project, we seek to provide such data and to analyze them.

Our research builds on survey and time-use data collected in the U.S. just prior to the implementation of widespread social distancing measures (February to early March, 2020) to better understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and wellbeing. In this, the first wave, 314 participants provided detailed time-use data covering approximately three days of their lives. We expanded our sample in Wave 2 (April – May, 2020), Wave 3 (late October to November, 2020), and Wave 4 (April – July, 2021) while seeking to retain as many previous participants as possible. We are maintaining a panel data set with over 5,000 U.S. residents, and we are planning another wave of data collection for Fall 2022.

We recruit participants primarily through the crowdsourcing platform Prolific. All participants are invited to complete an introductory survey, which records demographic information, mental and physical health, perceptions of COVID-19, and related measures. We then direct participants to create an account on our time-diary platform, where participants report detailed information about what they do during the following day, when they engage in these activities, and other contextual information, including where they were, who they were with, and how they felt.

This project has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. SES-2029963 and the University of Maryland Vice President for Research Coronavirus Research Seed Program.