Dynamic modeling of the Italians' attitude towards Covid-19

We analyze repeated cross-sectional survey data collected by the Institute of Global Health Innovation, to characterize the perception and behavior of the Italian population during the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the period that spans from April 2020 to July 2021. To accomplish this goal, we propose a Bayesian dynamic latent-class regression model, that accounts for the effect of sampling bias including survey weights into the likelihood function. According to the proposed approach, attitudes towards covid-19 are described via ideal behaviors that are fixed over time, corresponding to different degrees of compliance with spread-preventive measures. The overall tendency toward a specific profile dynamically changes across survey waves via a latent Gaussian process regression, that adjusts for subject-specific covariates. We illustrate the evolution of Italians' behaviors during the pandemic, providing insights on how the proportion of ideal behaviors has varied during the phases of the lockdown, while measuring the effect of age, sex, region and employment of the respondents on the attitude toward covid-19.