Authors: Macri Dimitra, Makris Ioannis.
Objective: The Coronavirus pandemic brought about a radical change in the way people live and interact. The purpose of the present study is to study the impact that the imposed stay-at-home and social distancing measures have had on people’s mental health. Our theoretical framework was anchored on Positive Psychology and its goals.
Method: While still in lockdown mode, we designed a questionnaire of 45 items regarding the association between mental health and lockdown conditions. We first tested the questionnaire’s pilot. We then incorporated in it the Big Five Personality Test as we wanted to find out to what extent the personality traits of each participant differentiated that participant from others during the stay-at-home and social distancing period. Last, we uploaded our questionnaire online and sent it to a sizeable, random sample in Greece and abroad. Once we had collected our data we subjected them to Descriptive, Factor, and ANOVA analyses.
Results: We received 284 responses to our questionnaire. 225 responses came from participants in Greece and 59 from participants in 22 European countries, the United States, Africa, and Asia. Our ANOVA analyses yielded interesting results. What is more, Positive Psychology’s P.E.R.M.A. model was confirmed by our data’s factor analysis albeit inversely: the emotions that stemmed from the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic were negative ones instead of positive, something that we found perfectly understandable.
Conclusion: The innovation of our study lies in the fact that not only did our research study the stay-at-home and social distance measures phenomenon during the very time that most countries worldwide were on lockdown but also recorded faithfully the psychological state of our questionnaire’s respondents during that period. We believe that our work may prove useful to scientists working on the issues linked to COVID-19, should the pandemic manifest itself through another outbreak. Moreover, our research could possibly serve as a study that could be linked potentially to cases of people who are mandatorily incarcerated in institutions, such as correctional facilities, or to cases where lockdowns and social distancing measures need to be imposed due to conditions arising from war, armed conflicts, or natural disasters and other force majeure circumstances.
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