Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Jun 15, 2021
Date Accepted: Apr 15, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Apr 18, 2022
Factors influencing increased use of technology to communicate with others during the COVID-19 pandemic?: A quantitative analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Communication via technology is regarded as an effective way of maintaining social connection and helping individuals to cope with the psychological impact of social distancing measures during a pandemic. However, there is little information about which factors that have influenced increased use of technology to communicate with others during lockdown and whether this has changed over time.
Objective:
To explore which psychosocial factors (e.g., mental health and employment) and pandemic-related variables (e.g., shielding and time) influenced an increase in communication via technology during the first lockdown in the United Kingdom (UK).
Methods:
A cross-sectional, online survey was conducted between April and July 2020, examining thoughts, feelings and behaviours associated with the pandemic, including communicating more using technology (e.g., by messaging, phone, or video). We collected sociodemographic information, employment status, mental health service user status, and depression symptoms. We used hierarchical logistic regression to test which factors influenced communicating more using technology during lockdown.
Results:
Participants (n=1464) were on average 41.27 (SD = 14.51) years old, mostly women (78%), White (86%), employed (70%), reported a mild level of depression (9.42, SD = 7.03), and were communicating more using technology (79.5%, n=1164). The hierarchical regression indicated that people who were employed and experiencing lower levels of depression were more likely to report increased communication using technology during lockdown and over time, men communicated more using technology. Increased use of technology to communicate with others was related to greater communication and the inability to see others due to the social distancing measures during lockdown. It was not related to a general increase in technology use during this period.
Conclusions:
Although most participants reported increased use of technology to communicate during lockdown, this was more apparent in the employed and those experiencing low levels of depression. Moving forward, we should continue to monitor groups who may have been excluded from the benefits of support and communication using technology.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.