Evandrou Maria, Falkingham Jane, Qin Min, Vlachantoni Athina
ESRC Centre for Population Change, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK.
Centre for Research on Ageing, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK.
SSM Popul Health. 2021 Feb 24;13:100761. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2021.100761. eCollection 2021 Mar.
The outbreak of Covid-19 in the UK has seen many families unexpectedly brought back together. The circumstances and stories of individual families have been picked up in the press focussing on the difficulties of people adjusting to their changed living arrangements. Yet, there have been few empirical analyses on how such changes might influence people's health and wellbeing. Therefore, this study explored the changing patterns of perceived stress by living arrangements change during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
The data used relates to 12,532 cohort members in the special Covid-19 surveys conducted with the participants of the 1958, 1970, 2000-01 British birth cohorts and Next Steps (born in 1989-90) in May 2020. Probit regression models were used to assess the chance of reporting increased stress amongst those who had experienced changes in living arrangements during the pandemic compared to those who had not.
The results provide strong evidence that those individuals whose living arrangements changed during the Covid-19 pandemic have a higher likelihood of reported increased stress than those whose living arrangements remained unchanged. This was most clearly seen for older cohorts. Increased interpersonal conflict plays a role in mediating the association, especially for the younger cohort.
The findings confirm that during the first lockdown, changing living arrangements were negatively associated with individuals' mental wellbeing. As prolonged periods of stress can lead to serious health problems and policymakers need to be mindful that services may need to take these new, albeit for many temporary, forms of living arrangements into account.
英国新冠疫情的爆发使许多家庭意外团聚。媒体报道了个别家庭的情况和故事，重点关注人们适应生活安排变化的困难。然而，关于这些变化如何影响人们的健康和幸福，实证分析却很少。因此，本研究探讨了在2020年新冠疫情第一波期间，生活安排变化导致的感知压力变化模式。
所使用的数据来自于2020年5月对1958年、1970年、2000 - 01年英国出生队列以及“下一步”（1989 - 90年出生）参与者进行的特殊新冠疫情调查中的12532名队列成员。使用概率单位回归模型评估在疫情期间生活安排发生变化的人与未发生变化的人相比，报告压力增加的可能性。
结果提供了有力证据，表明在新冠疫情期间生活安排发生变化的个体，比生活安排未变的个体报告压力增加的可能性更高。这在老年队列中最为明显。人际冲突加剧在这种关联中起到了中介作用，尤其是在年轻队列中。
研究结果证实，在首次封锁期间，生活安排的变化与个体的心理健康呈负相关。由于长期压力会导致严重的健康问题，政策制定者需要注意，服务可能需要考虑到这些新的、尽管对许多人来说是暂时的生活安排形式。
