Week 7: Learning Log

My Coding Goals this Week

My goals this week were to do my slides for the presentation and prepare my script. We have finished reproducing all our data and had our meeting with Jenny this week to discuss our upcoming presentation next week. We will meet again after the long weekend after we have finished our slides.

Downloading Everything

# setting the CRAN mirror
options(repos = c(CRAN = "http://cran.rstudio.com"))

install.packages("rmdformats")
## 
## The downloaded binary packages are in
##  /var/folders/cw/l9bfyrms3md0tbkr1866zbl80000gn/T//Rtmp0IsxnG/downloaded_packages
library(rmdformats)
library(knitr)

Challenges and Successes

We had already made a Google Doc for our script a few weeks ago, so I just had to write up my slide for our presentation next week. This didn’t take too long as I had to condense my bit into one slide.

Here is the info on my slide:

Aims

Investigate if thinking you have had COVID-19 decreases the probability of reporting the adherence to lockdown measures

Variables

IV → thinking you have had COVID-19 DV → self-reporting on adherence to various lockdown measures + perceived immunity/worry to themselves/others

Method:

Online cross-sectional survey 6149 UK participants aged 18+

Results:

those who believed they had had COVID-19 = ↑ likely to think they are immune + stop participating in activities such as washing hands + social distancing

Conclusion:

  • No media communications specifically target those who believed they have had COVID-19
  • Worth addressing this gap in the media
  • Reliance on self-reported measures → social desirability bias impacts rates
  • Represent UK population?

Script/Extras

I also have notes on the study’s hypothesis, extra notes on results and discussion which I will put in here. I doubt I will have time during our presentation as I have the shortest part of talking briefly about our summary.

Hypothesis

It was hypothesised that people who believed they had had COVID-19 were more likely to believe they had increased immunity to COVID-19, in addition to being less likely to follow lockdown measures, less likely to worry about COVID-19 and perceive a lower risk of COVID-19 to others.

Results

Those who thought they had had COVID-19:

  • More likely to agree they had immunity
  • Less likely to adhere to social distancing measures
  • Went shopping for groceries more frequently
  • Went out more times in the last 7 days
  • Less worried about COVID-19
  • Less likely to correctly identify COVID-19 symptoms

Discussion

This study highlights the lowered social norm of adhering to lockdown measures. Study limitations:

  • Does the response represent the general population?
  • Participation bias? However low risk because they didn’t know the survey topic
  • Reliance on self-reported measures - influence of social desirability bias → rates of adhering to measures might have been inflated
  • Cross-sectional design - can’t determine direction of associations

Next Steps…

My next steps are to prepare with my team for our presentation next week.

Thank you for reading my learning log :)