'Nine-Countries-Study: One year with COVID-19' (AsPredicted #64865)
Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 3 authors.
Pre-registered on 05/02/2021 09:17 AM (PT)
1) Have any data been collected for this study already? No, no data have been collected for this study yet.
2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? How is the exposure to the current COVID-19 situation for one year related to subjective well-being in different countries (i.e., Germany, France, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, UK, U.S., China)?
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Current exposure to the COVID-19 crisis, individual reaction and feelings to/about the COVID-19 crisis, the way information about the current COVID-19 situation is gained, control and predictability of life, perception of the communication and general action by the national government and authorities considering the current COVID-19 situation (all items are developed by our research team), positive mental health (Positive Mental Health Scales, PMH-Scale; Lukat et al., 2016), depression, anxiety and stress symptoms (Depression, Anxiety Stress Scales 21, DASS-21; Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995), perceived social support (Brief Perceived Social Support Questionnaires, F-SozU K-6; Lin et al., 2018), current state of physical health (Item 1 of the EQ-5D; Janssen et al., 2013), risk-taking propensity (Dohmen one-Item measure; Dohmen et al., 2011), problematic social media use (Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale; Andreassen et al., 2017).
Data for all measures will be collected online. The available validated translations of the instruments in the national languages of the respective countries will be used. For all other instruments the translation will be prepared by our research team.
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? The study is design as an online survey (one measurement time point). All participants will be asked to response to the same survey in their national language.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. Correlation analyses, linear and hierarchical regression analyses, as well as mediation and moderation analyses will be conducted to investigate the relationship between the assessed variables in the eight countries. To investigate specific group differences (for example individuals who use social media as an information source and these who do not do this) multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA) will be conducted. Moreover, to investigate cross-cultural differences and similarities structural equation models will be conducted.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. Only participants who provide complete data will be included in the analyses. We will compute the overall means and standard deviations, and exclude obvious outliners.
7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size? No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined. Respectively, N = 1000 in each investigated country (overall N = 9000) will be collected by an independent social market and research institute.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) In addition to demographic data, for exploratory purpose, individual perception of social cohesion and connectedness, fairness, freedom, and wealth of the own country, and individual self-assessment (instruments are developed by our research team) will be assessed. Findings of this study will be compared with findings of our Eight-Country-Study (https://aspredicted.org/e7a9g.pdf).