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Reason: The Department of Health and Social Care own the data, so they cannot be made available to anyone without their permission.

Factors associated with wearing a facemask in shops in England following removal of a legal requirement to do so during the COVID-19 pandemic

dataset
posted on 2024-01-24, 17:04 authored by Louise SmithLouise Smith, James RubinJames Rubin

Objectives: We aimed to identify psychological factors associated with the use of facemasks in shops in England following removal of legal requirements to do so, and to compare associations with and without legal restrictions.

Design: Repeated cross-sectional online surveys (n ≈ 2000 adults) between August 2020 and April 2022 (68,716 responses from 45,682 participants) using quota sampling.

Methods: The outcome measure was whether those who had visited a shop for essentials in the previous seven days reported always having worn a facemask versus sometimes or not at all. Psychological predictor variables included worry, perceived risk and severity of COVID-19 and the perceived effectiveness of facemasks. Socio-demographic variables and measures of clinical vulnerability were also measured. For the period following removal of legal restrictions, multivariable regression was used to assess associations between the primary outcome variable and predictors adjusting for socio-demographic and clinical vulnerability measures. The analysis was repeated including interactions between psychological predictors and presence versus absence of legal restrictions.

Results: Worry about COVID-19, beliefs about risks and severity of COVID-19 and effectiveness of facemasks were substantially and independently associated with the use of facemasks. Removal of legal obligations to wear facemasks was associated with a 25% decrease in wearing facemasks and stronger associations between psychological predictors and wearing facemasks.

Conclusions: Legal obligations increase rates of wearing a facemask. Psychological factors associated with wearing a facemask could be targets for interventions aiming to alter rates of wearing a facemask. These interventions may be more effective when there are no legal obligations to wear a face covering in place.

Funding

Evaluating and improving communication with the public during a pandemic, using rapid turn around telephone surveys

NIHR Evaluation Trials and Studies Coordinating Centre

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Department of Health and Social Care

History

Geospatial coverage

England

Data collection from date

2021/07/26

Data collection to date

2022/04/13

Collection method

Online survey. Participants were eligible to take part if they lived in the UK and were aged 16 years or older. Participants were recruited from two specialist research panel providers (Respondi, n=50,000; Savanta, n=31,500) using quota sampling (age and gender combined, and region). These are people who have signed up to take part in online surveys. Consent was implied by participants’ completion of the survey, as is the industry standard. Data were collected in line with the terms and conditions that people agreed to when signing up to be a member of the research panel.