The negative and positive: perceptions regarding COVID-19 pandemic among an online sample of adults; qualitative study
View abstract on PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.The COVID-19 pandemic caused fear, disrupted plans, and work stress for adults in Sri Lanka. Despite challenges, many found value in spending quality time with family.
Area Of Science
- Public Health
- Sociology
- Psychology
Background
- The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted global lifestyles, creating widespread stressors.
- Understanding public perception is crucial for managing health crises.
Purpose Of The Study
- To explore adult perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sri Lanka.
- To identify key themes influencing public response to the pandemic.
Main Methods
- A descriptive exploratory study utilizing qualitative methods.
- Purposive sampling of the general public in Sri Lanka.
- Thematic analysis of data from twelve in-depth, semi-structured interviews.
Main Results
- Seven themes emerged: traditional disease views, fear, disrupted plans, altered responsibilities, work stress, family time, and future pandemic preparedness.
- Participants, all under 50 and educated, reported significant psychological and social impacts.
- Key findings highlight both negative stressors and positive coping mechanisms like cherishing family time.
Conclusions
- The pandemic induced fear, uncertainty, and work-related stress among Sri Lankan adults.
- Despite stressors, a notable outcome was increased appreciation for family time.
- Findings suggest a need for targeted public health interventions addressing psychological and social well-being during pandemics.
Related Concept Videos
Often, psychologists develop surveys as a means of gathering data. Surveys are lists of questions to be answered by research participants, and can be delivered as paper-and-pencil questionnaires, administered electronically, or conducted verbally. Generally, the survey itself can be completed in a short time, and the ease of administering a survey makes it easy to collect data from a large number of people.
Surveys allow researchers to gather data from larger samples than may be afforded by...
A modern form of aggression is bullying. As you learn in your study of child development, socializing and playing with other children is beneficial for children’s psychological development. However, as you may have experienced as a child, not all play behavior has positive outcomes. Some children are aggressive and want to play roughly. Other children are selfish and do not want to share toys. One form of negative social interactions among children that has become a national concern is...
Conformity is the change in a person’s behavior to go along with the group, even if that person does not agree with the group.
Asch’s Original Study
Solomon Asch conducted several experiments in the 1950s to determine how people are affected by the thoughts and behaviors of other people. In one study, a group of participants was shown a series of printed line segments of different lengths: a, b, and c. Participants were then shown a fourth line segment: x. They...
A heuristic is a general problem-solving framework (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). You can think of these as mental shortcuts that are used to solve problems. Different types of heuristics are used in different types of situations, and the impulse to use a heuristic occurs when one of five conditions is met (Pratkanis, 1989):
When one is faced with too much information
When the time to make a decision is limited
When the decision to be made is unimportant
When there is access to very...
Sometimes we want to see how people change over time, as in studies of human development and lifespan. When we test the same group of individuals repeatedly over an extended period of time, we are conducting longitudinal research. Longitudinal research is a research design in which data-gathering is administered repeatedly over an extended period of time. For example, we may survey a group of individuals about their dietary habits at age 20, retest them a decade later at age 30, and then again...
In cross-sectional research, a researcher compares multiple segments of the population at the same time. If they were interested in people's dietary habits, the researcher might directly compare different groups of people by age. Instead of following a group of people for 20 years to see how their dietary habits changed from decade to decade, the researcher would study a group of 20-year-old individuals and compare them to a group of 30-year-old individuals and a group of 40-year-old...

