Data and Code for: The Impact of COVID-19 on Access to Mental Healthcare Services

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Benjamin Harrell, Vanderbilt University

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
DoReplication.do	text/plain	1.4 KB	01/05/2023 12:28:AM
DtaReplication.dta	application/x-stata-dta	78.7 KB	01/05/2023 12:25:AM
LICENSE.txt	text/plain	14.6 KB	01/05/2023 12:30:AM
Readme.txt	text/plain	253 bytes	01/05/2023 12:41:AM

Project Citation:

Harrell, Benjamin. Data and Code for: The Impact of COVID-19 on Access to Mental Healthcare Services. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2023. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2023-05-01. https://doi.org/10.3886/E183121V1

Project Description

Summary: The COVID-19 pandemic increased the rate of mental health disorders, as well as demand for mental health services. It remains unclear, however, the extent to which the pandemic impacted access to mental health services. Using data from an audit field experiment, we examine the impact of COVID-19 on access to mental health care appointments in the United States. This experiment ran from January to May 2020 and overlapped with the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Funding Sources: United States Department of Health and Human Services. National Institutes of Health. National Institute of Mental Health (5T32AG000244-23)

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: Randomized Control Trial

JEL Classification:
      C93 Field Experiments
      I11 Analysis of Health Care Markets
      I18 Health: Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

Geographic Coverage: USA

Time Period(s): 1/28/2020 – 5/15/2020

Collection Date(s): 1/28/2020 – 5/15/2020

Universe: Mental health practitioners across the US

Data Type(s): experimental data

Methodology

Response Rate:

We sent 1 message to 1000 mental health practitioners.

We received 755 response messages.

Sampling:

In order to be included in our sample, a mental health practitioner (MHP) must: 1. must not specialize exclusively on specific types of patients who are outside of the scope of our experiment (e.g., children, or couples therapy; 2. must not be specialized in a type of therapy (e.g., grief, domestic violence) that would not deal with the common mental health condition; 3. must list an individual's profile (e.g., it cannot be the profile of a clinic); 4. must provide an option to email them through a web form; 5. must be accepting patients (i.e., we do not contact MHPs that indicate that they are not currently accepting patients).

After accounting for these characteristics, we select MHPs proportionately to state populations; specifically, we divide states in terciles, based on their population.

Within states, we select MHPs proportionally to the population of each ZIP code such that our final sample is nationally representative.

Data Source: To collect our sample of auditable mental healthcare providers, we use a popular online therapist search database.

Collection Mode(s): other

Unit(s) of Observation: Mental health pracitioner

Geographic Unit: State

Related Publications

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Published Versions

V1 [2023-05-01]

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DDI 2.5

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