Measuring voluntary and policy-induced social distancing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic

Principal Investigator(s):  View help for Principal Investigator(s) Youpei Yan, Yale University; Amyn Malik, Yale Institute for Global Health; Jude Bayham, Colorado State University; Eli P. Fenichel, Yale University; Chandra Couzens, Yale School of Public Health; Saad B. Omer, Yale Institute for Global Health

Version:  View help for Version V1

Name File Type Size Last Modified
  datasets 03/17/2021 04:44:PM

Project Citation: 

Yan, Youpei, Malik, Amyn, Bayham, Jude, Fenichel, Eli P., Couzens, Chandra, and Omer, Saad B. Measuring voluntary and policy-induced social distancing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-03-17. https://doi.org/10.3886/E135121V1

Project Description

Summary:  View help for Summary
Staying home and avoiding unnecessary contact is an important part of the effort to contain COVID-19 and limit deaths. Every state in the United States enacted policies to encourage distancing and some mandated staying home. Understanding how these policies interact with individuals’ voluntary responses to the COVID-19 ep- idemic is a critical initial step in understanding the role of these nonpharmaceutical interventions in transmission dynamics and assessing policy impacts. We use variation in policy responses along with smart device data that measures the amount of time Americans stayed home to disentangle the extent that observed shifts in staying home behavior are induced by policy. We find evidence that stay-at-home orders and voluntary response to locally reported COVID-19 cases and deaths led to behavioral change. For the median county, which implemented a stay-at-home order with about two cases, we find that the response to stay-at-home orders increased time at home as if the county had experienced 29 addi- tional local cases. However, the relative effect of stay-at-home or- ders was much greater in select counties. On the one hand, the mandate can be viewed as displacing a voluntary response to this rise in cases. On the other hand, policy accelerated the response, which likely helped reduce spread in the early phase of the pan- demic. It is important to be able to attribute the relative role of self- interested behavior or policy mandates to understand the limits and opportunities for relying on voluntary behavior as opposed to im- posing stay-at-home orders.



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