To analyse the impact of the UK response to the pandemic in terms of health equity, in our SSRN working paper: “The Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on inequality of opportunity in psychological distress in the UK”. we first examine inequality in psychological distress and then decompose this into the share of total inequality in nigeria rcs data psychological distress that is attributable to observed individual circumstances.
To do this, which launched a Covid-19 survey to examine the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
During April 2020, selected participants from the Understanding Society survey have been approached to complete a short survey that focuses on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
We linked this to previous Understanding Society waves. We use these data to measure inequality in mental health, as measured by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), which captures twelve indicators of psychological distress. This allows a comparison of inequalities in the distribution of GHQ before and at the peak of the first phase of the pandemic, when the fieldwork was completed on 30 April 2020, for a sample of 7,789 respondents.
The findings show a substantial and systematic worsening of the levels of GHQ post-Covid.
This applies to nearly all of the individual elements of GHQ and to overall GHQ scores. For example the prevalence of psychological distress based on the GHQ-12 Caseness scoring, increases from 18.3% to 28.3%.