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What a Thesis Paper is and How to Write One

From choosing a topic and conducting research to crafting a strong argument, writing a thesis paper can be a rewarding experience.

It can also be a challenging experience. If you've never written a thesis paper before, you may not know where to start. You may not even be sure exactly what a thesis paper is. But don't worry; the right support and resources can help you navigate this writing process.

What is a Thesis Paper?

A thesis paper is a type of academic essay that you might write as a graduation requirement for certain bachelor's, master's or honors programs. Thesis papers present your own original research or analysis on a specific topic related to your field.

“In some ways, a thesis paper can look a lot like a novella,” said Shana Chartier , director of information literacy at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). “It’s too short to be a full-length novel, but with the standard size of 40-60 pages (for a bachelor’s) and 60-100 pages (for a master’s), it is a robust exploration of a topic, explaining one’s understanding of a topic based on personal research.”

Chartier has worked in academia for over 13 years and at SNHU for nearly eight. In her role as an instructor and director, Chartier has helped to guide students through the writing process, like editing and providing resources.

Chartier has written and published academic papers such as "Augmented Reality Gamifies the Library: A Ride Through the Technological Frontier" and "Going Beyond the One-Shot: Spiraling Information Literacy Across Four Years." Both of these academic papers required Chartier to have hands-on experience with the subject matter. Like a thesis paper, they also involved hypothesizing and doing original research to come to a conclusion.

“When writing a thesis paper, the importance of staying organized cannot be overstated,” said Chartier. “Mapping out each step of the way, making firm and soft deadlines... and having other pairs of eyes on your work to ensure academic accuracy and clean editing are crucial to writing a successful paper.”

How Do I Choose a Topic For My Thesis Paper?

What your thesis paper is for will determine some of the specific requirements and steps you might take, but the first step is usually the same: Choosing a topic.

“Choosing a topic can be daunting," said Rochelle Attari , a peer tutor at SNHU. "But if (you) stick with a subject (you're) interested in... choosing a topic is much more manageable.”

Similar to a thesis, Attari recently finished the capstone  for her bachelor’s in psychology . Her bachelor’s concentration is in forensics, and her capstone focused on the topic of using a combined therapy model for inmates who experience substance abuse issues to reduce recidivism.

“The hardest part was deciding what I wanted to focus on,” Attari said. “But once I nailed down my topic, each milestone was more straightforward.”

In her own writing experience, Attari said brainstorming was an important step when choosing her topic. She recommends writing down different ideas on a piece of paper and doing some preliminary research on what’s already been written on your topic.

By doing this exercise, you can narrow or broaden your ideas until you’ve found a topic you’re excited about. " Brainstorming is essential when writing a paper and is not a last-minute activity,” Attari said.

How Do I Structure My Thesis Paper?

Thesis papers tend to have a standard format with common sections as the building blocks.

While the structure Attari describes below will work for many theses, it’s important to double-check with your program to see if there are any specific requirements. Writing a thesis for a Master of Fine Arts, for example, might actually look more like a fiction novel.

According to Attari, a thesis paper is often structured with the following major sections:

Introduction

• Literature review
• Methods, results

Now, let’s take a closer look at what each different section should include.

Your introduction is your opportunity to present the topic of your thesis paper. In this section, you can explain why that topic is important. The introduction is also the place to include your thesis statement, which shows your stance in the paper.

Attari said that writing an introduction can be tricky, especially when you're trying to capture your reader’s attention and state your argument.

“I have found that starting with a statement of truth about a topic that pertains to an issue I am writing about typically does the trick,” Attari said. She demonstrated this advice in an example introduction she wrote for a paper on the effects of daylight in Alaska:

In the continental United States, we can always count on the sun rising and setting around the same time each day, but in Alaska, during certain times of the year, the sun rises and does not set for weeks. Research has shown that the sun provides vitamin D and is an essential part of our health, but little is known about how daylight twenty-four hours a day affects the circadian rhythm and sleep.

In the example Attari wrote, she introduces the topic and informs the reader what the paper will cover. Somewhere in her intro, she said she would also include her thesis statement, which might be:

Twenty-four hours of daylight over an extended period does not affect sleep patterns in humans and is not the cause of daytime fatigue in northern Alaska .

Literature Review

In the literature review, you'll look at what information is already out there about your topic. “This is where scholarly articles  about your topic are essential,” said Attari. “These articles will help you find the gap in research that you have identified and will also support your thesis statement."

Telling your reader what research has already been done will help them see how your research fits into the larger conversation. Most university libraries offer databases of scholarly/peer-reviewed articles that can be helpful in your search.

In the methods section of your thesis paper, you get to explain how you learned what you learned. This might include what experiment you conducted as a part of your independent research.

“For instance,” Attari said, “if you are a psychology major and have identified a gap in research on which therapies are effective for anxiety, your methods section would consist of the number of participants, the type of experiment and any other particulars you would use for that experiment.”

In this section, you'll explain the results of your study. For example, building on the psychology example Attari outlined, you might share self-reported anxiety levels for participants trying different kinds of therapies. To help you communicate your results clearly, you might include data, charts, tables or other visualizations.

The discussion section of your thesis paper is where you will analyze and interpret the results you presented in the previous section. This is where you can discuss what your findings really mean or compare them to the research you found in your literature review.

The discussion section is your chance to show why the data you collected matters and how it fits into bigger conversations in your field.

The conclusion of your thesis paper is your opportunity to sum up your argument and leave your reader thinking about why your research matters.

Attari breaks the conclusion down into simple parts. “You restate the original issue and thesis statement, explain the experiment's results and discuss possible next steps for further research,” she said.

Find Your Program

Resources to help write your thesis paper.

While your thesis paper may be based on your independent research, writing it doesn’t have to be a solitary process. Asking for help and using the resources that are available to you can make the process easier.

If you're writing a thesis paper, some resources Chartier encourages you to use are:

• Citation Handbooks: An online citation guide or handbook can help you ensure your citations are correct. APA , MLA and Chicago styles have all published their own guides.
• Citation Generators: There are many citation generator tools that help you to create citations. Some — like RefWorks — even let you directly import citations from library databases as you research.
• Your Library's Website: Many academic and public libraries allow patrons to access resources like databases or FAQs. Some FAQs at the SNHU library that might be helpful in your thesis writing process include “ How do I read a scholarly article? ” or “ What is a research question and how do I develop one? ”

It can also be helpful to check out what coaching or tutoring options are available through your school. At SNHU, for example, the Academic Support Center offers writing and grammar workshops , and students can access 24/7 tutoring and 1:1 sessions with peer tutors, like Attari.

"Students can even submit their papers and receive written feedback... like revisions and editing suggestions," she said.

If you are writing a thesis paper, there are many resources available to you. It's a long paper, but with the right mindset and support, you can successfully navigate the process.

“Pace yourself,” said Chartier. “This is a marathon, not a sprint. Setting smaller goals to get to the big finish line can make the process seem less daunting, and remember to be proud of yourself and celebrate your accomplishment once you’re done. Writing a thesis is no small task, and it’s important work for the scholarly community.”

A degree can change your life. Choose your program  from 200+ SNHU degrees that can take you where you want to go.

Meg Palmer ’18 is a writer and scholar by trade who loves reading, riding her bike and singing in a barbershop quartet. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English, language and literature at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and her master’s degree in writing, rhetoric and discourse at DePaul University (’20). While attending SNHU, she served as the editor-in-chief of the campus student newspaper, The Penmen Press, where she deepened her passion for writing. Meg is an adjunct professor at Johnson and Wales University, where she teaches first year writing, honors composition, and public speaking. Connect with her on LinkedIn .

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• Open access
• Published: 29 August 2024

The causal relationship model of factors influencing COVID-19 preventive behaviors during the post-pandemic era and implications for health prevention strategies: a case of Bangkok City, Thailand

• Piyapong Janmaimool 1 ,
• Jaruwan Chontanawat 2 ,
• Siriphan Nunsunanon 3 &
• Surapong Chudech 3  

BMC Infectious Diseases volume  24 , Article number:  887 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Though, many countries are currently in the COVID post-pandemic era, people’s health protective behaviours are still essential to protect their health and well-being. This study aims to evaluate people’s understanding and perceptions of COVID-19 risk characteristics (i.e. threat occurrence, threat severity, perceived susceptibility and exposure), the health risk perception towards COVID-19, and health protective behaviours. The study also aims to estimate the associations among these factors by the analysis of structural equation modelling (SEM).

From 15 October to 9 November 2022, questionnaire surveys were administrated to 521 people living in Bangkok of Thailand by using the convenience sampling technique. The analyses were carried out in three phases including descriptive statistical analyses, a measurement model assessment using a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis.

The results of descriptive analyses demonstrated that the majority of respondents, 39.9%, had the age between 20 and 30 years old, and 61.4% of them were female. Approximately 52.1% of them had a bachelor’s degree. Upon analysing individuals’ understanding and perceptions of all risk characteristics, individuals’ understanding of COVID-19 severity did not statistically affect health risk perception towards COVID-19, whereas perceived exposure had the strongest effect and in turn influenced health protective behaviours. Perceived susceptibility and understanding of the threat occurrence also significantly affected health risk perception, and indirectly affected health protective behaviours.

Conclusions

This study implies that though the potential health impact of COVID-19 is perceived as less severe, people can still construct a perception of its risk particularly based on their perceived exposure and susceptibility. Thus, communicating people about exposure conditions and susceptibility can greatly contribute to people’ construction of risk perception towards COVID-19 which subsequently leads to the decision to perform health protective behaviours.

This study investigated whether people still construct a perception of COVID-19 related risk during the post-pandemic era.

Though the potential health impact of COVID-19 is perceived as less severe, people still constructed a perception of its risk particularly based on their perceived exposure and susceptibility.

Risk perceptions of COVID-19 during the post-pandemic era could explain only 10–23% of variances in heath protective behaviours.

Upon analysing individuals’ perceptions of all risk characteristics, perceived severity of COVID-19 did not statistically affect risk perception, whereas perceived exposure had the strongest effect.

Perceived susceptibility and occurrence of COVID-19 spreading also significantly affected risk perceptions, and indirectly affected health protective behaviours.

Thus, communicating people about exposure conditions and susceptibility is effective to promote heath protective bahaviours during the post-pandemic era.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

Since the first emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic in early December 2019, massive efforts to control and manage the virus transmissions have been implemented. Healthcare workers as well as individuals have been encouraged to perform health protective behaviours against the virus. Though, the COVID-19 situations have been improving in several countries, the COVID-19 is still a public health threat which requires individuals’ health protective actions and effective health systems. The health impact of COVID-19 can be very devastating as the virus potentially causes severe respiratory illness [ 1 , 2 ], and subsequently leads to death [ 3 , 4 ]. The physical symptoms of COVID-19 are such as fever, cough, difficulty breathing, sore throat, headache, loss of smell or taste, and conjunctivitis [ 5 , 6 ]. Several studies reported sever health impacts of COVID-19. Jiménez-Zarazúa et al. [ 7 ] reported that many COVID-19 patients developed acute respiratory distress syndrome, a pathology which can potentially cause chronic lung damage. Pereckaitė et al. [ 6 ] added that COVID-19 patients could develop organ damage including myocarditis and pericarditis.

By mid-October 2022, it was reported by World Health Organization (WHO) that approximately 621 million people had contracted the virus, and 6.5 million people died [ 8 ]. Since, the COVID-19 pandemic had been declared by WHO as a global health emergency in March 2020, the WHO and the governments of each country recommended both medical staff and the general population use COVID-19 Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), such as medical and non-medical face masks (e.g. self-made masks of cloth, cotton or other textiles), face shields, aprons and gloves [ 9 ]. The current COVID-19 situation has become better than the situation in the last three years, and the WHO decided to declare an end of global emergency status for COVID-19 in May 2023 [ 10 ]. However, health impacts of COVID-19 still exist. Many people, particularly vulnerable groups (e.g., elderly people with age over 60 years, people with underlying health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and respiratory illnesses, and pregnant women) [ 11 ], can be killed by this virus, and there is a high chance that new variants will occur and consequently cause new cases and deaths. WHO [ 12 ] states that it is still necessary to continue protecting people, particularly the most vulnerable group against the virus. WHO also recommends that people should continue to take the preventive actions needed to protect their health. The continuous use of personal protective equipment (PPE) by healthcare workers and individuals is recommended by WHO [ 8 ]. Essential PPE includes gloves, medical masks, goggles or a face shield, and gowns, as well as for specific procedures, respirators, and aprons.

Since the first occurrence of COVID-19 in Thailand, the Thai population has been encouraged to perform health protective behaviours. Many Thai population were active to wear face masks during the pandemic era (2020–2021) [ 13 ]. However, the Thai government by the Ministry of Public Health has announced that Thailand entered to the post-pandemic era since June 2022, and the cancellation of the state of emergency declaration was also announced in September 2022, due to a decrease in death rate, and a high percentage of vaccination coverage [ 14 ]. As of 15th November 2022, 54 provinces out of 77 provinces achieved 2-dose vaccination coverage of more than 70% [ 14 ], and the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) was reduced from 1.89% in January 2022 to 0.01% at the end of October 2022. Though, COVID-19 pandemic is improving in Thailand, it is still important to maintain health protective behaviours.

It becomes challenging to encourage people to continue preforming health protective behaviours against COVID-19, as they have become familiar with the situation, and have tended to forget to perform such protective behaviours against COVID-19. The focus of this research is thus examining factors influencing people’s health protective behaviours against COVID-19. Several scholars have stated that individuals’ health protective behaviours are greatly influenced by their risk perception of the pandemic, thus leading to these behaviours. For instance, Wismans et al. [ 15 ] revealed that the perceived health risk of COVID-19 positively affects face mask use. According to the Health Belief Model (HBM) [ 16 ] and Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) [ 17 ], health protective behaviours are influenced by individuals’ risk perceptions (described in PMT as individuals’ threat appraisal). Understanding risk perception, its determinants and its association with health protective behaviours can reveal how to develop communication strategies which can enhance people’s motivation to perform the protective behaviours. Bruine de Bruin and Bennett [ 18 ] confirmed that individuals with a greater risk perception are more likely to perform health protective behaviours. Similarly, many studies conducted during the COVID-19 outbreak have confirmed that risk perception is related to the implementation of COVID-19 prevention behaviours [ 19 , 20 , 21 ]. However, what should be elaborated are determinants of risk perception which can be diverse. Understanding determinants of risk perception can provide basic understanding on how to maintain people’s constructed risks associated with COVID-19 which consequently influence their health protective behaviours.

In this way, how people judge and perceive the risks associated with COVID-19 can affect their performance of health protective behaviours. Based on the psychometric paradigm developed by Slovic [ 22 ], risk perception can be constructed based on individuals’ rational thinking process by considering a combination of (perceived) risk characteristics, such as perceived severity of the risk, perceived exposure to the risk, controllability, familiarity and observability. Fischhoff et al.’s [ 23 ] research in the modern day implies that individuals’ perceived risks of the COVID-19 can be amplified or attenuated due to differences in individuals’ understanding or judgement of risk characteristics. Regarding risk perception towards COVID-19 pandemic, Lohiniva at al. [ 24 ] indicated that individuals’ interpretation, comprehension, understanding and perceptions of the virus characteristics could have a significant impact on individuals’ health risk perception. The virus characteristics are such as the scope of pandemic, the severity of the symptoms caused by infection, the risk of virus transmission, virus exposure environments, and vulnerable health conditions. Cardona et al. [ 25 ] classified risk characteristics into three aspects.

The first one is hazard, which refers to the possible, future occurrence of undesirable events that may have adverse effects on vulnerable and exposed elements [ 26 , 27 ]. The second aspect is exposure, or the inventory of elements in an area in which hazardous events may occur [ 28 ]. In the event that people are not living in potentially dangerous settings, no problem of disaster risk would exist. The last aspect is vulnerability, which refers to the propensity of exposed elements such as human beings, their livelihoods and assets suffering adverse effects when impacted by hazard events [ 27 ]. Vulnerability relates to susceptibilities, fragilities, weaknesses, deficiencies or insufficient capacities that cause adverse effects for exposed elements. COVID-19 can be considered a type of disaster event. Therefore, the ways individuals understand and perceive characteristics of this pandemic risk, including hazard, exposure and vulnerability, may shape their health risk perceptions, which consequently leads to participation in health protective behaviours.

Understanding what is driving the health risk perception can allow risk communicators to communicate with the public about risks, subsequently promote behavioural change [ 24 ]. Based on the psychometric paradigm [ 22 ], this study assumes that individuals use their rational thinking to judge risk of COVID-19, and thus are motivated to perform health protective behaviours. Through rational thinking, individuals’ health risk perceptions can be determined by how they understand and judge risk characteristics [ 22 , 23 ]. This study divides risk characteristics into three aspects: perceived exposure, vulnerability and hazard, which includes threat occurrence and severity [ 25 ]. Differences in individual judgements of these risk characteristics may affect health risk perception, thus leading to a difference in health protective behaviours. Currently, the COVID-19 outbreak situation is changing over time due to the consecutive emergence of new coronavirus variants and vaccination types. This change may influence the way people construct risks and health responses.

Accordingly, this study aims to examine people’s risk perception towards COVID-19 during the post-pandemic era, and examine how the risk perception towards COVID-19 have been influenced by the understanding and perceptions of risk characteristics (i.e. threat occurrence, threat severity, individual susceptibility and exposure). Finally, the effect of risk perception on health protective behaviours will be examined. The casual relationship of factors influencing health protective behaviours against COVID-19 will be evaluated by the analysis of structural equation modelling (SEM). Bangkok city of Thailand was selected as a case study because it is a highly populated area and individuals’ heath protective behaviours against COVID-19 should be strongly promoted. By understanding the association among factors influencing individuals’ health protective behaviours could help provide significant implications for the development of communication strategies to promote protective behaviours against COVID-19 during the post-pandemic era.

Literature review and hypotheses

• Health protective behaviours

Several studies revealed effectiveness of health protective behaviours in reducing risks of infection [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 ]. For instance, the study of Lio et l. [ 30 ] revealed that outdoor mask wearing could reduce COVID-19 risk by 69.3% after adjusting for other confounders such as contact history, hygiene practice, and being in crowded activities. The study of Hajmohammadi et al. [ 31 ] reported that the application of PPE or facial mask use was significantly associated with a decrease in risk of COVID-19 infections. In Thailand, people are especially encouraged to participate in COVID-19 self-preventive measures. First, since ATKs were approved for home use by the Ministry of Public Health Thailand’s Food and Drug Administration, people have been encouraged to use them to test for COVID-19 infection when they have suspicious symptoms, or when they must be in a crowded and inadequately ventilated space. Though they have low sensitivity, immunochromatographic assay rapid antigen test (RAT) and ATK kits are affordable and accessible to the general public. RAT kits require minimal training and equipment, and are very useful for the identification of infected people [ 33 ]. The purpose of RAT kits is to detect the nucleocapsid protein of COVID-19 in nasal swab specimens [ 34 ]. RATs can detect the presence of a specific viral antigen, which implies COVID-19 infection. Currently authorized methods may include point-of-care tests and at-home self-tests, and are applicable to people of any age [ 35 ].

Second, people in Thailand are encouraged to use face masks. According to the WHO’s COVID-19 advice for the public [ 36 ], people are encouraged to wear a mask as a normal part of being around others if COVID-19 is spreading in their community. Several studies have revealed the effectiveness of wearing a face mask in preventing the spread of COVID-19 [ 37 ]. Chua et al. [ 38 ] and Pullangott & Kannan [ 39 ] demonstrated that droplets containing the virus can be filtered by face masks. Face masks have been utilized as a public and personal health control measure, and have been widely implemented to control the spread of COVID-19 [ 40 ]. Moreover, several studies have shown that wearing two masks creates more filtration efficiency than just one, and can substantially reduce individuals’ exposure to the virus [ 41 , 42 ]. In Thailand, according to an order published in the Royal Gazette in June 2021, people were required to wear a face mask in public places [ 43 ]. However, on 23 June 2022, the wearing of face masks became voluntary, though many parties still encourage people to do so [ 44 ].

Risk perception towards COVID-19 and health protective behaviours

Risk perception refers to a subjective assessment of a potential threat to individuals’ lives or psychological well-being [ 41 ]. Lohiniva at al. [ 24 ] explain risk perception as one’s subjective assessment of the actual or potential threat to one’s life or one’s psychological well-being. Slovic [ 45 ] defines risk perception as the assessment of the severity and probability of negative outcomes. Regarding risk perception towards COVID-19, risk perception consists of two aspects including the probability of being infected by the virus (i.e., infection probability) and the perceived severity of the symptoms after actual infection (i.e., outcome severity) [ 46 , 47 ]. For instance, Adachi et al. [ 48 ] measured risk perception of COVID-19 based on individuals’ perceived possibility of being infected with the COVID-19 and severity of severe illness caused by the infection. Risk perception can be estimated with respect to one’s personal situation or general population at large.

The Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) [ 17 ] explains risk perception (threat appraisal) as individuals’ estimation of the level of threat to themselves and their valued things which relatively influence behavioural responses against their facing threat. Based on PMT, risk perception contains two aspects: individuals’ perceived severity of the threat and their perceived probability of facing adverse impacts from the threat. PMT has been widely and successfully applied in the context of health threats to explain how people’s feelings of fear affect their health response or health behaviours [ 49 ]. To measure health risk perception based on PMT, researchers examine individuals’ beliefs in the severity of the threat to their valued things (perceived severity) and their estimation of the chance of being affected by the health risk (perceived vulnerability) [ 50 , 51 ]. Like PMT, Becker’s [ 52 ] Health Belief Model (HBM) also explains risk perception, particularly in the context of health, as individuals’ feelings of the seriousness or harmfulness of contracting a disease, and individuals’ perceived possibility of contracting an illness or disease. Both theories assume that health risk perceptions affect health preventive behaviours.

These theories have been applied in many studies to explore determinants of health behaviours. For instance, Becker [ 52 ] utilized the HBM to find that health behaviours are driven by individuals’ risk perceptions of disease susceptibility and severity. Regarding the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak, many studies revealed that higher perceptions of SARS infection were significantly related to engagement in more preventive behaviours and compliance with disease control strategies [ 49 , 53 ]. Further, Siegrist and Bearth [ 54 ] concluded that perceived threat to individuals’ environment influences their compliance with protective measures. With COVID-19, several studies have also demonstrated COVID-19’s perceived social risk to be associated with engagement in protective measures [ 55 , 56 ]. Asri et al. [ 57 ] revealed that among younger age groups, the perceived threat of COVID-19 to other people beyond themselves was more influential in affecting their decision to wear masks; in contrast, older people were motivated to wear a mask based on their perceived threat to themselves. Wise et al. [ 58 ] found that individuals’ health risk perceptions affect their compliance with COVID-19 measures. In general, both self- and other-related risk perceptions are assumed to have a positive effect on individuals’ decision to wear a mask.

The Ministry of Public Health of Thailand has promoted three types of COVID-19 self-preventive measures, which are considered effective to reduce risks of COVID-19 infections [ 59 ]. These measures are wearing a face mask outside the home or double face masks in highly crowded or poorly ventilated places, and using RAT kits for COVID-19 detection, as widely encouraged by many parties (e.g. educational institutes, companies and government offices). This study accordingly assumes that individuals’ practice of COVID-19 preventive measures can be predicted by health risk perception. Beyond exploring the effect of risk perception on decisions to perform health preventive behaviours, as widely reported in many relevant studies [ 55 , 59 ], this study intends to reveal the effect of health risk perception on the intensity of health preventive practices, as reflected by the degree of PPE use. Namely, when individuals perceive a high health risk, they tend to perform intensive practice of health preventive behaviours, such as wearing a face mask and using ATKs for COVID-19 detection.

Understanding and perceptions of risk characteristics as factors influencing risk perception and Health Protective behaviours

Based on the psychometric paradigm [ 22 ], individuals’ risk perception is based on their rational thinking process, itself based on their interpretation, comprehension and understanding of risk characteristics. Cardona et al. [ 25 ] classified risk characteristics into three dimensions: hazard, vulnerability and exposure to a harmful event. In the psychometric paradigm, risk perception can be generated from the evaluation of these risk characteristics, which fall under “unknown risk” or “dread risk” [ 22 ]. Dread risk refers to individuals’ perception of catastrophic consequences of a threat or harmful event, and perception of their control over exposure to that risk. These perceptions can affect individuals’ feelings of fear and drive their motivation to perform response behaviours. The more fear that individuals construct when being exposed to a risk, the more they tend to perceive the risk as higher [ 60 , 61 ]. In turn, unknown risk refers to the characteristics of a harmful event, particularly if it is familiar, predictable, observable and understood [ 62 , 63 ]. Risks can be perceived as high if individuals are not familiar with the harm; risks might also have delayed effects.

For this study, individuals’ understanding, and perceptions of all risk characteristics (hazard, susceptibility and exposure) are deliberatively explored to determine whether and how they affect risk perception. The first risk characteristic is hazard. Each hazard has two particular features that individuals perceive differently according to their understanding, comprehension, and interpretation: threat occurrence and threat severity. With threat occurrence, individuals who recognize the possibility of threat occurrence start assessing the risk that they may face, and consequently construct risk perception. Meanwhile, threat severity refers to the threat’s catastrophic consequence(s). According to the psychometric paradigm [ 22 ], individuals who are aware of a threat’s catastrophic consequences are more likely to construct risks. Saito et al. [ 64 ] revealed that threat occurrence (e.g. earthquakes) significantly affects risk perception. Regarding COVID-19, Lohiniva et al. [ 24 ] found that individuals’ understanding of the nature of the virus, such as its potential health impacts, affect their health risk perception.

The second risk characteristic that can influence risk perception is risk susceptibility – in this case, specifically disease susceptibility. Disease susceptibility refers to conditions in which individuals can be easily affected by a harmful medical event, such as having poor health conditions, a chronic disease or limited capacity to cope with a disease. For instance, Ritz et al. [ 65 ] noted that health status, particularly respiratory or allergen-based illnesses, is relatively associated with air pollution perception. McCormack et al. [ 66 ] told that obesity makes individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) susceptible to indoor particulate matter. Socio-economic characteristics can also be associated with personal susceptibility. For example, younger people construct a lower risk perception of COVID-19 than older people [ 67 ], because the young population generally has better health. Ding et al. [ 68 ] revealed that female and non-medical students construct a higher level of perceived risk to COVID-19 than male and medical students. Many previous studies revealed that individuals’ perceived susceptibility to disease can increase their health risk perception. For instance, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals with different degrees of perceived susceptibility show significant differences in their risk perception of the virus [ 69 ]. Makhanova and Shepherd [ 70 ] indicated that individuals’ perceived vulnerability to disease contributes to stronger reactions to the COVID-19 threat, including an increased degree of anxiety, demand for behavioural change and higher importance granted to proactive behaviour. The study of Adachi et al. [ 48 ] found that perceived poor health conditions were significantly associated with high-risk perception towards COVID-19 infection and illness. Several studies have explored how perceived susceptibility directly affects health protective behaviours as well [ 71 ]. For instance, Tang and Wong [ 72 ] found that Chinese citizens who constructed a low level of perceived susceptibility to the 2003 SARS epidemic tended to participate less in health protective behaviours, such as wearing face masks and sanitizing hands.

The last type of risk characteristic is exposure. Individuals’ exposure to a threat can determine their perceived risk as feeling exposed to a threat, which in turn can make them aware of the possibility of its negative impacts. Orru et al. [ 73 ], for instance, found that individuals’ perceived exposure to PM 10 determines their health risk perception, which consequently influences health symptoms due to stress and anxiety. Lee et al. [ 74 ] revealed that when exposed to an individual sneezing in public, individuals’ perceived risks to potential threats relatively increase. Similarly, Koh et al. [ 75 ] found that an increase in health risk perception was determined by individuals’ perceived exposure to the electromagnetic waves emitted from 5G network base stations. In terms of COVID-19 transmission, the virus can travel on droplets that might be larger or smaller than 5 μm. Exhaled droplets over 5 μm will fall to the ground within some distance from the exhaling person [ 76 ], whereas droplets smaller than 5 μm (called aerosols) originate directly from exhalation and can stay in the air for a long time [ 77 ]. Aerosols can then provide ambient virus exposure. Individuals’ exposure to viral transmission can therefore be attributed to moving between places [ 78 ], participating in face-to-face activities [ 79 ], being in crowded environments [ 80 ] and being in poorly or non-ventilated spaces [ 80 , 81 ]. Hong et al. [ 82 ] notably found that areas with higher population flows have more COVID-19 infection rates. People have also been widely educated about the nature of virus transmission, and can therefore construct a perception of their exposure which might consequently influence their health risk perceptions, and their decision to perform protective behaviours.

Currently, the COVID-19 situation is ever-changing due to the consecutive emergence of new coronavirus variants, vaccination developments and changes in the mitigation and prevention of measures such as lock-downs. This study assumes that these changes affect people’s understating, interpretation and perceptions of risk characteristics related to COVID-19, which in turn, affect their risk perception. As discussed above, risk perception of COVID-19 is the sum of two aspects including individuals’ perceived infection probability and perceived outcome severity or perceived severity of the symptoms after actual infection [ 46 , 47 , 83 ]. Based on theoretical discussion, these two components of risk perception can be evaluated and perceived differently by individuals based on the understanding and perceptions of risk characteristics including (1) understanding of threat occurrence (e.g., virus transmission, locations of virus transmission, and an occurrence of pandemic) (2) understanding of threat severity (e.g., possibility of death, the severity of the symptoms associated with the virus, or possible sever illness), (3) perceived exposure to COVID-19 transmission (e.g., exposure conditions) and (4) perceived susceptibility to COVID-19 (e.g., sensitiveness to the impacts). Once risks of COVID-19 are perceived in some level, it is likely that individuals will perform behavioural responses or recommended health protective behaviours against COVID-19. Risk perceptions can play an important role in driving motivation to perform actions to eliminate risks. In another word, risk perceptions of COVID-19 can provide a legitimate reason for individuals to endorse the significance of recommended health protective behaviours. For instance, the study of Schmitz et al. [ 84 ] revealed that individuals with a high perception of severe illness after COVID-19 infection reported higher motivation to uptake vaccination, which in turn affected an effective uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine. Based on this discussion, the following research hypotheses can thus be proposed (see Fig.  1 ):

Conceptual framework of this study

People’s understanding of threat occurrence can affect health protective behaviours against COVID-19 via their risk perception towards COVID-19.

People’s understanding of threat severity can affect health protective behaviours against COVID-19 via their risk perception towards COVID-19.

People’s perceived exposure to COVID-19 transmission can affect health protective behaviours against COVID-19 via their risk perception towards COVID-19.

People’s perceived susceptibility to COVID-19 can affect health protective behaviours against COVID-19 via their risk perception towards COVID-19.

Study design and study area

This study adopted a cross-sectional study design by using questionnaire surveys. Both online and face-to-face questionnaire surveys were conducted from 15 October to 9 November 2022 in Bangkok city of Thailand. Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, forms the country’s highest populated area, with approximately 5.5 million people living in an area of 1,568 km 2 [ 85 ]. Bangkok contains 50 administrative districts. For this study, 5 districts with the largest population as of 2021 [ 86 ] were selected for questionnaire surveys (see Fig.  2 ). Those districts include Sai Mai having a population of 206,831 people, Khlong Sam Wa having a population of 206,437 people, Bang Khae having a population of 192,431 people, Bang Khen having a population of 186,200 people and Bang Khun Thian having 184,944 people.

Participants and data collection

The population of this research is people in Bangkok city of Thailand. The sample size was calculated based on the formula of Cochran et al. [ 87 ]. The confidence level was set at 95%, and margin of error was set at 5%. A proportion of people who perform health protective behaviors against COVID-19 was set at 0.5 for calculating the max sample size (n). Accordingly, the result showed the appropriate sample size of 385 participants. However, to enhance reliability of data analysis, and to avoid insufficient datasets caused by a great number of incomplete survey responses and low response rate, this research recruited more participants. The estimated response rate was set as 70%, thus, approximately 550 participants were recommended. In total, questionnaire sheets were distributed to 550 research participants with a convenient sampling technique during the period of 15 October − 9 November 2022.

The questionnaire surveys were conducted in 5 selected administrative districts of Bangkok city. Approximately 110 residents in each target district were invited to participate in the data collection, and both face-to-face (F2F) and online questionnaire surveys were employed to collect data. The inclusion criteria were such as aged over 18 years, Thai citizens, and living in the survey area for more than 6 months. The exclusion criteria were healthcare workers such as medical staff and nurses; those who were having COVID-19 at the time of survey; or those who were caring for COVID-19-infected people at the time of survey. Because these groups of people were basically required to practice health protective measures against COVID-19. After the data collection, due to some incompletely responded questionnaire sheets, 29 samples were excluded, and 521 samples were suitable for data analysis.

Ethical consideration

Before participants were requested to complete a questionnaire, the participants’ consent was received, and they were informed that their participation in the data collection was voluntary and had no negative impacts. In addition, participants were informed that they could deny answering sensitive questions (i.e., income, gender), if they feel discomfort. Ethical consideration for this research was evaluated and approved by the ethical research committee of King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT). The date of approval is October 4th, 2022, and the approval number is KMUTT-IRB 2022/0928/252.

Research tool

To collect the data, a questionnaire was developed based on a review of relevant literature. The questionnaire items used for measuring studied variables are presented in Table  1 . The structure of questionnaire, explanation of the studied variables, types of questions and scales for the survey, are described in Table  1 . The questionnaire’s validity was first evaluated by three experts. The Item-Objective Congruence (IOC) method was used to test content validity, and the questions having an IOC score lower than 0.50 were revised based on experts’ suggestion [ 88 ]. A pilot study was then conducted with 30 people to test the questionnaire’s reliability, which showed an acceptable Cronbach’s alpha (α) value of 0.87, exceeding the minimum requirement of 0.70 [ 89 ]. In addition, the scales for measuring risk perception towards COVID-19 (e.g., perceived probability of being infected by COVID-19 and perceived harmfulness of consequences caused by COVID-19 infection), and individuals’ understanding and perceptions of risk characteristics (e.g., understanding of threat severity, understanding of threat occurrence, perceived individual exposure, and perceived individual susceptibility) showed acceptable reliability with Cronbach’s alpha (α) values ranging from 0.74 to 0.89. All validated questionnaire items are shown in Table  1 .

Data analysis

Before the data analysis, all collected data were screened for completion, with any questionnaire sheets that were not completed excluded. The data analysis itself was divided into three steps. First, analyses of each variable’s descriptive statistics were performed. Then, a measurement model was estimated to test whether the questionnaire items had internal consistency when measuring each variable, as well as the scales’ construct and discriminant validity [ 93 ]. In the assessment of measurement model, the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted to verify the construct validity of the scales used for measuring latent constructs [ 94 ]. The validity of measurement model was confirmed by fit indices (e.g., Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA), Goodness of Fit Index (GFI), and Comparative Fit Index (CFI), and Chi-square(χ 2 )) [ 95 , 96 ]. Based on this step, some questionnaire items with a low factor loading (< 0.60) were removed to enhance the internal consistency of each construct [ 97 ]. Additionally, to verify the measurement reliability and validity of each latent construct, Cronbach’s alpha (α) coefficients, average variance extracted (AVE) and combined reliability (CR) were calculated. Finally, the relationships outlined in the structural model were assessed by analysing the structural equal model (SEM) using IBM AMOS 2.5 and IBM SPSS statistics 22. The proposed relationship among the variables influencing health protective behaviours against COVID-19 is shown in Fig.  1 . The model fit was tested via the chi-squared test (χ 2 ), root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), comparative fit index (CFI) and goodness of fit indices (GFIs) [ 96 , 97 ]. Lastly, the risk characteristic constructs’ ability to predict infectious waste generation behaviours was derived.

Characteristics of participants

The participant characteristics are shown in the Table  2 . The proportion of female participants was 61.4% ( n  = 320) of the sample, while the proportion of male participants was 34.7% ( n  = 181). Approximately 3.8% of the sample did not want to identify their gender. Regarding age, most participants ( n  = 208, 39.9%) had the age between 20 and 30 years old. The participants younger than 20 years old was the minority ( n  = 21, 4.0%). The proportion of participants who had a bachelor’s degree was the majority ( n  = 272, 52.21%), while r participants who had an education level below a bachelor’s degree accounted for 12.48% ( n  = 65). Considering an average income, the proportion of participants who had an income lower than 15,000 baht or 420 USD was almost equivalent to the proportion of participants with an income more than 35,000 baht or 975 USD, 37% and 37.6% respectively. Additionally, most participants ( n  = 313, 60.1%) lived in their house, and approximately 58.4% ( n  = 304) had 1–3 family members.

The survey results revealed that most of the research participants (38%) tested for COVID-19 infection by using ATKs approximately 1–2 times per month. Participants who tested for COVID-19 less than 1 time per month accounted for 31% of the study population. Approximately 2% reported using ATKs more than 3 times per week. Regarding the number of face masks used to prevent COVID-19, the results showed that most participants (52.2%) used 5–7 masks per week. Approximately 20% reported using 8–10 face masks per week, and about 7% reported using more than 13 per week. Regarding the use of double masks for COVID-19 prevention, the results revealed that most participants (approximately 38%) reported sometimes wearing double masks, while approximately 28% reported never wearing double masks. Participants who reported regularly wearing double masks accounted for 8.6% (see Table  3 ).

Descriptive statistics and measurement Model

Health risk perceptions.

After screening the data for completion, mean and standard deviation were calculated of study variables (see Table  4 ). A second order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was also performed to test the interactions between each health risk perception construct and its observed indicators. It was assumed that health risk perception was a general latent variable which could in turn be explained by two first-order factors, specifically perceived probability of contracting COVID-19 (PP) and perceived harmfulness of the virus’s impacts (PH). After excluding three observed indicators of PH (PH5–7) with low loading estimates (< 0.05) [ 87 , 88 ], the model was determined to have an acceptable fit with the data (Brown [ 98 ]; chi-square (χ 2 ) = 6.815; degree of freedom (df) = 6; p  = 0.338; ratio of chi-square/degree of freedom (χ 2 /df) = 1.136; GFI = 0.996; Tucker–Lewis Index (TLI) = 0.998; CFI = 1.000; AGFI = 0.983; RMSEA = 0.016). The two latent variables of the second-order CFA model explained the second-order latent “health risk perception” variable. The standardized beta coefficients obtained from the PP and PH latent variables were β = 0.799, p  < 0.01 and β = 0.75, p  < 0.01, respectively. Based on these results, an indicator of health risk perception was created by calculating an average score from the 7 items in the two first-order latent variables (M = 3.187, SD = 0.750).

Considering the loadings of the observed indicators shown in Table  4 , the loadings were acceptable, as all items were significantly loaded on their designated latent variables ( p  < 0.001), and had a standardized factor loading > 0.60 that indicated convergent validity [ 99 ]. Two latent variables (PP and PH) were also significantly loaded on health risk perception. Moreover, the reliability and validity of the latent variables was examined via three indicators: composite reliability (CR), average variance extracted (AVE) and Cronbach’s α. AVE reflects the average amount of variance that a construct can explain in its indicators, with an AVE of ≥ 0.5 indicating suitable convergent validity [ 99 ]. This study’s data yielded AVE scores of 0.536 and 0.644, greater than the generally accepted minimum of 0.5 [ 100 ]. CR, meanwhile, is calculated to test the reliability of a latent variable [ 101 ], and implies how each indicator is consistent in what it intends to measure. The model assessment showed CR values of 0.822 and 0.855, which were greater than the acceptable threshold of 0.70, indicating that the latent variable measurement model had good reliability [ 100 ]. For Cronbach’s α, which is calculated to assess the internal reliability of the given measures, the values of the two latent variables were greater than the threshold of 0.70, indicating internal reliability [ 100 ]. Based on the calculations of these three indicators, the model was internally consistent, while the observed indicators substantially measured the constructs of health risk perception.

Determinates of health risk perception

CFA was performed to test the measurement reliability and validity of the factors that potentially affect health risk perception. CFA indicates the factor loading for each item in each variable. This study had four variables that were assumed to have an effect on health risk perception: understanding of threat occurrence (T), understanding of threat severity (S), perceived exposure (PE) and perceived susceptibility to COVID-19 (PSC). Statistical analysis again indicated the model’s acceptable fit with the data (Brown, [ 98 ]; χ 2  = 36.373; df = 34; p  = 0.359; χ 2 /df = 1.170; GFI = 0.982; TLI = 0.996; CFI = 0.998; AGFI = 0.963; RMSEA = 0.018). As seen in Table  5 , the factor loadings of all items were above the standard value of 0.60 [ 99 ], indicating convergent validity. To verify the convergent validity of the model’s latent variables, AVE and CR were also calculated, yielding AVE values ranging from 0.640 to 0.779, which were greater than acceptable minimum of 0.5 [ 100 ], and CR values ranging from 0.842 to 0.891, which also met the acceptable threshold of 0.7 [ 100 ]. In addition, Cronbach’s α was calculated to evaluate the measures’ internal reliability. The Cronbach’s α coefficients for the scales ranged from 0.864 to 0.892, which were above the threshold of 0.7 [ 100 ]. The measurement model was thus internally consistent, and all items could be used to measure factors that affect health risk perception.

Additionally, the correlation analyses were performed to verify discriminant validity. According to Pearson’s correlation analysis, the correlations between the study variables (T, S, PE, PSC, PP, PH, ATK, MM and DMM) were statistically significant ( p  < 0.05; Fornell & Larcker, [ 100 ]), confirming discriminant validity. The coefficient values were not greater than 0.60, indicating that there was no problem with multicollinearity [ 102 ]. In this way, the structural equation model (SEM) analysis could be carried out to test the developed conceptual model presented in Fig.  1 .

Structural model assessment

A SEM analysis was performed to test the association among study variables, that is, risk characteristic constructs, health risk perception and health protective behaviours. The study first checked the overall fit of the model with the data, with the results indicating that the model did not fit with the observed data, and the latent variable “S” (understanding of threat severity) did not significantly affect health risk perception. Therefore, to improve the model’s fit, “S” was removed. The proposed model then fit perfectly with the data, as the χ 2 value was not statistically significant (χ 2  = 105.166; df = 97; p  = 0.268), and χ2/df was 1.084, which is not greater than 5.0 [ 99 ]. Other statistical indices also implied the acceptance of the structural model. The GFI value was 0.979, which was greater than 0.90, indicating a close fit between the observed data and the structural model [ 99 ]. The RMSEA value was 0.013, less than 0.08 and thus indicating a reasonable approximation of the data [ 103 ]. The CFI value was then calculated to explain the discrepancy function adjusted for sample size; this value was acceptable at 0.998, which is greater than 0.90 [ 104 ]. The analysis also yielded an incremental fit index (IFI) value of 0.998, which is greater than 0.900 and thus indicates the proposed model’s acceptability [ 105 ]. The normed fit index (NFI) and TLI values also met the standard value of 0.9, exhibiting that the structural model perfectly fit the observed data [ 105 ]. Overall, the proposed structural model was statistically acceptable (see Fig.  3 ).

The study’s structural equation modelling (SEM; ** p  < 0.001)

Effect of risk characteristic constructs on health risk perception, and the effect of health risk perception on health protective behaviours

The path coefficients among the study variables were examined next. The hypothesized paths from risk characteristic constructs (e.g., understanding of threat occurrence (T), perceived exposure (PE) and perceived susceptibility to COVID-19 (PSC)) to the latent variable of risk perception were statistically significant. Namely, T (β = 0.292; t = 5.289; p  < 0.001), PE (β = 0.388; t = 5.525; p  < 0.001) and PSC (β = 0.336; t = 3.727; p  < 0.001) significantly affected risk perception. In this way, H2 was rejected, as it was excluded from the model.

Considering standardized beta values, perceived exposure to COVID-19 transmission (PE) had the greatest impact on risk perception, and understanding of threat occurrence (T) had the lowest impact. The predicted paths from risk perception also significantly affected three types of health protective behaviours: frequency of COVID-19 ATK use (β = 0.478; t = 8.467; p  < 0.001), quantity of medical face masks used in a week (β = 0.465; t = 8.313; p  < 0.001) and frequency of wearing double medical face masks (β = 0.320; t = 5.833; p  < 0.001). When considering the standardized beta values, the impact of health risk perception on frequency of COVID-19 ATK use (ATK) was the greatest (see Table  6 ).

Mediation effect of risk perception on the relationship between risk characteristic constructs and health protective behaviours

To test the mediating effect of risk perception on the relationship between risk characteristic constructs and health protective behaviours, bootstrapping analysis was performed. The results revealed that risk perception mediated the effect of risk characteristic constructs T, PE and PSC on each type of health protective behaviour (see Table  7 ). Namely, understanding of threat occurrence (T), perceived exposure to COVID-19 transmission (PE) and perceived susceptibility to COVID-19 (PSC) had a significant indirect effect on health protective behaviours via risk perception. In this way, H1, H3 and H4 were accepted. The study then compared the indirect effects of T on each type of health protective behaviour. The bootstrapping analysis revealed that the indirect effect of T on frequency of COVID-19 ATK use (ATK) via risk perception was the greatest (0.205), and its indirect effect on the quantity of medical face masks used in a week (MM) was the lowest (0.185). For perceived exposure, the indirect effect of PE on the frequency of wearing double medical face masks (DMM) was the greatest (0.194), whereas its indirect effect on MM was the lowest (0.163). Perceived susceptibility to COVID-19 (PSC) had the greatest indirect effect on ATK (0.105) and the lowest indirect effect on DMM (0.095).

The COVID-19 situation is changing over time. This change could affect the way people perceive the risks associated with COVID-19, thus affecting their health protective behaviours (e.g. face mask wearing and ATK testing). Practising health protective behaviours to prevent and control COVID-19 consequently contributes to good health outcomes. This study was based on the assumption that how people perceive risks affects their health protective behaviours, and how people’s understanding and perceptions of risk characteristics related to COVID-19 could shape the way people construct their health risk perception. These characteristics are hazard (threat occurrence and threat severity), individual susceptibility and exposure to the virus.

This study first revealed that individuals’ health risk perceptions were significantly determined, in order, by their perceived exposure to the virus, perceived susceptibility and understanding of the possibility of threat occurrence. In contrast, understanding of threat severity was not a significant predictor of health risk perception. The combination of individuals’ understanding and perceptions of these three risk characteristics could explain 62% of variance in overall health risk perceptions. This finding supports the notion of Slovic et al. [ 106 ], who proposed that individuals’ risk perception is constructed based on their understanding of risk characteristics and affective responses (e.g. dread, worry) to a particular health threat. However, in assessing all risk characteristics, this study demonstrated that individuals’ understanding of a threat severity (COVID-19) is not a significant factor that affects individuals’ risk perception. This implies that though the virus itself is perceived as less dangerous due to people’s increased self-immunity (i.e. vaccination), individuals can still construct health risks to such a degree that they perceive the virus as harmful to human health. This is because individuals evaluate the degree of facing health risks mainly based on their perceived exposure (e.g. being in a crowded environment, travelling, living with people who always do outside activities) and individual susceptibility (e.g. poor health conditions or having a chronic disease). The results of this study thus contradict many previous studies that have reported the significant effect of perceived severity of a threat (or its catastrophic consequences) on individuals’ health risk perception [ 107 , 108 ].

This study does, however, strengthen the psychometric paradigm proposed by Slovic [ 22 ] by providing evidence that individuals’ perceived control over their exposure plays an important role in shaping risk perceptions of COVID-19. Feeling lack of control over their exposure can cause fear in individuals, thus leading to the development of a greater risk perception. In turn, individuals’ perceived catastrophic consequences of a threat might not be important, particularly in situations where people are familiar with the threat. As this study was conducted from October to November 2022, when the COVID-19 outbreak had been present for almost 3 years, the participants were quite familiar with the virus.

Individuals’ perceived susceptibility or weakness to a health threat was found to be a significant determinant of COVID-19 risk perception. Namely, the participants who had a higher perception of their own weakness to COVID-19 (e.g. having a chronic disease) tended to construct a higher health risk perception. Many studies have also reported the significant effect of individuals’ perceived susceptibility to a disease on health risk perception [ 22 , 48 , 104 ]. People with vulnerable conditions might feel that they are sensitive to a disease threat; consequently, they construct a feeling of fear or worry that leads to health risk perception [ 22 ]. For instance, the study of Adachi, et al. [ 48 ] revealed that participants who reported poorer health conditions were more likely to report a significant higher level of risk perception towards COVID-19. Furthermore, this study showed that individuals’ understanding of threat occurrence (existence or occurrence of COVID-19 spreading) significantly influenced a degree of health risk perception in the participants. However, its power to predict health risk perception was weaker than perceived exposure and perceived susceptibility. This is attributable to people still needing to know about a hazard’s possibility of occurrence to initiate evaluations of their risk, and thus decide whether to take preventive measures.

Additionally, this study revealed that health risk perception mediated the effect of individuals’ perceptions of risk characteristics on health protective behaviours. Health risk perception significantly directly affected health preventive behaviours. The direct effect of risk perception on health protective behaviours can be supported by the HBM [ 52 ], as well as many previous studies that confirm that health risk perception contributes to the practice of health protective measures [ 109 , 110 , 111 ]. For instance, Bruine de Bruin and Bennett [ 19 ] found that people were more likely to comply with health protective measures if they had a high level of perceived risk related to COVID-19, as based on their perceived possibility of infection and infection fatality. Similarly, Tang and Wong [ 112 ] reported that health risk perception based on the perceived probability of being infected or the perceived harmfulness of illness among adult Chinese individuals in Hong Kong encouraged them to comply with health-related guidelines. Leppin and Aro [ 113 ] also found that risk perception only predicts individuals’ protective behaviours when people possess self-efficacy or response efficacy.

Recommendations and conclusion

This study can provide practical implications for the development of communication strategies which can motivate people to participate in health protective behaviours against COVID-19. Even though, the findings may need further explorations to be generalized to the public at large due to the limitations related to the sample size and unique characteristics of the samples who were urban populations in Bangkok city of Thailand, the results could provide evident-based risk communication efforts based on the results generated from the scientific and analytical method. Risk communicators (e.g., health professionals, healthcare staff, community leaders, and the government) could gain the deep understanding of how people constructed the risk perception of COVID-19 infection and illness during the post-pandemic era, and how the risk perception could influence the performance of health protective behaviours against COVID-19. Types of risk messages which can enhance or reduce people’s risk perception are identified.

The study revealed that perceived exposure had the strongest impact on individuals’ risk perception, and risk perception in turn significantly affected all three types of health protective behaviours (frequency of COVID-19 ATK use, quantity of medical face masks used in a week and frequency of wearing double medical face masks). In addition, the study revealed that people’s risk perception was constructed based on their perceived susceptibility (i.e., poor health conditions, having chronic disease) and their understanding of threat occurrence. Thus, vulnerable groups, such as people with chronic diseases or poor health conditions, are likely to be active to act against COVID-19. Based on the current COVID-19 situation, even though, the pandemic is better than before, and the virus is perceived as less harmful to human health, people can construct risk perceptions as long as COVID-19 endures and people feel susceptible to the virus. These constructed risk perceptions are essential in promoting the performance of health protective behaviours against COVID-19.

To promote the construction of risk perception towards COVID-19, communicating the public with these three types of risk message can be effective. The first type of risk message is information related threat occurrence such as the possibility of virus transmission, characteristics of transmission, possibility of virus mutations and the exist of COVID-19 pandemic. If people perceive that the pandemic still exists, and the virus is contagious, people will start to think about their possibility to be inflected. The second type of risk message is information about exposure to COVID-19 such as the risk of virus transmission in particular environments (i.e., crowed and narrow places and areas with poor ventilation) and in particular groups of people (i.e., careless people and people having a social lifestyle associated with many people such as parties, events, and travel). If people could understand COVID-19 exposure conditions, they could judge their possibility to be infected with the virus based on their living contexts and lifestyles. The third type of risk message is information about vulnerable conditions to COVID-19 (e.g., elderly people and people with chronic diseases such as hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, obesity, and cancer). This type of information can help people judge the seriousness of illness if they are infected. If the health impacts caused by infection are perceived high, people are likely to construct a high risk perception. The result of this study showed that three types of perceptions and understanding of these risk characteristics could explain 62% of variances in health risk perception which in turn influenced health protective behaviours. Furthermore, it should be highlighted that during the post-pandemic era, communicating with the public about severity of COVID-19 inflections (e.g., number of deaths, mortality rate, possible severe symptoms) as always performed during the pandemic period, might not be successful in promoting self-protective behaviours. Because people become familiar with the nature of virus transmission and severity of infections. This finding could provide the theoretical perspective on health risk perception. Namely, when people are familiar with a threat, people’s understanding and perceptions of threat severity (e.g., the severity of symptoms caused by the virus, the probability of death) might not be influential to the construction of health risk perception.

Study limitations

First of all, it is important to note that the findings of this research are based on self-reported data from a specific urban population (Bangkok city of Thailand). Thus, the study has limited capacity to generalize the results to the populations at large. Second, this study contains some limitations related to uncontrolled or unmeasured variables that could have influenced the results of the study. Those uncontrolled variables are such as socio-demographic factors, social influence, and governmental policies. Third, health risk perception, together with its significant determinants, predicted 23% of the variance in the frequency of COVID-19 ATK use, 22% of the variance in quantity of medical face masks used in a week but only 10% of the variance in frequency of wearing double medical face masks. The leftover total variance might be explained by social factors (i.e., peer influence, social norms), the impact of governmental policies, perceived self-efficacy and response efficacy, as recommended by Rogers’s [ 17 ] PMT and Leppin and Aro [ 113 ]. Further research may therefore include an efficacy variable, socio-demographic factors, and social influence to enhance the model’s ability to predict individuals’ health protective behaviours.

Data availability

The datasets used and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Authors would like to thank all participants who provided information for this study. Authors also thank Mahidol University for providing publication fund and School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi for providing a scholarship to conduct this research, grant number: 2566201.

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Janmaimool, P., Chontanawat, J., Nunsunanon, S. et al. The causal relationship model of factors influencing COVID-19 preventive behaviors during the post-pandemic era and implications for health prevention strategies: a case of Bangkok City, Thailand. BMC Infect Dis 24 , 887 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12879-024-09818-8

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12 misleading or lacking-in-context claims from Harris’ DNC speech

Domenico Montanaro

Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, made 12 misleading or lacking-in-context statements during her speech at the Democratic National Convention last week. Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

There were about a dozen statements that Vice President Kamala Harris made during her roughly 40-minute acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that were either misleading or lacking in context.

They range from characterizations of former President Trump’s stances on abortion rights and Social Security to her plans to address housing and grocery prices.

It’s the role of the press to try and hold politicians to account for the accuracy of their statements in a good-faith way. The dozen Harris statements lacking in context are far less in comparison to 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies that NPR found from Trump’s hour-long news conference Aug. 8.

Nonetheless, here’s what we found from Harris’ convention speech:

1. “His explicit intent to jail journalists, political opponents, and anyone he sees as the enemy.” 

Trump has promised retribution against his political enemies, has called reporters “the enemy of the people,” and has made vague threats of jail time for reporters.

“They’ll never find out, & it’s important that they do,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform after the leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision was published. “So, go to the reporter & ask him/her who it was. If not given the answer, put whoever in jail until the answer is given. You might add the editor and publisher to the list.”

He’s made other such comments, but there’s no explicit and specific policy from Trump on this because, as with many things involving Trump, he has been vague about his specific intentions.

2. “[W]e know and we know what a second Trump term would look like. It's all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisers. And its sum total is to pull our country back to the past.” 

Project 2025 is the work of people with close ties to Trump through the Heritage Foundation. Trump has disavowed parts of Project 2025, and a campaign official called it a “ pain in the ass .” There’s good political reason for that. Many of the detailed proposals are highly controversial and unpopular. The website for Project 2025 lays out some of the connections to the Trump administration in black and white, as well as the group’s belief that a Trump administration will use it as a blueprint:“The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is being organized by the Heritage Foundation and builds off Heritage’s longstanding ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ which has been highly influential for presidential administrations since the Reagan era. Most recently, the Trump administration relied heavily on Heritage’s “Mandate” for policy guidance, embracing nearly two-thirds of Heritage’s proposals within just one year in office.

“ Paul Dans , former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) during the Trump administration, serves as the director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Spencer Chretien , former special assistant to the president and associate director of Presidential Personnel, serves as associate director of the project.”

In fact, CNN reported that “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and adviser Stephen Miller.

What’s more, CBS News found at least 270 policy proposals that intersect with the about 700 laid out in Project 2025.

3. “We're not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.” 

Former President Trump has pledged not to cut Social Security, the popular retirement program. While he was in office, Trump did try, unsuccessfully, to cut benefits for people who receive disability payments from Social Security.

Social Security benefits could be cut within a decade anyway, unless Congress takes steps to shore up the program. With tens of millions of baby boomers retiring and starting to draw benefits, and fewer people in the workforce paying taxes for each retiree, Social Security is expected to run short of cash in 2033. If that happens, almost 60 million retirees and their families would automatically see their benefits cut by 21%.

The problem could be solved by raising taxes, reducing benefits or some combination of the two. – Scott Horsley, NPR chief economics correspondent

4. “We are not going to let him end programs like Head Start that provide preschool and childcare for our children in America.”

This is again tied to Project 2025, but not something Trump has specifically talked about. Trump has talked about shutting down the Department of Education, but Head Start is funded through the Department of Health and Human Services.

5. “[A]s president, I will bring together labor and workers and small-business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs to grow our economy and to lower the cost of everyday needs like healthcare and housing and groceries.”

High supermarket prices are a common complaint. Although grocery prices have largely leveled off, rising just 1.1% in the 12 months ending in July, they jumped 3.6% the previous year and a whopping 13.1% the year before that. Vice President Harris has proposed combating high grocery prices with a federal ban on “price gouging,” but her campaign has offered no specifics on how that would work or what would constitute excessive prices. The Biden-Harris administration has previously blamed some highly concentrated parts of the food chain – such as meat-packers – for driving up prices. The administration has tried to promote more competition in the industry by bankrolling new players. – Scott Horsley

6. “And we will end America's housing shortage.”

The U.S. faces a serious shortage of housing, which has led to high costs. The average home sold last month for $422,600. Last week, Harris proposed several steps to encourage construction of additional housing, including tax breaks intended to promote 3 million new units in four years. (For context, the U.S. is currently building about 1.5 million homes per year, including just over a million single family homes.) Harris has also proposed $25,000 in downpayment assistance for first-time homebuyers and a $40 billion fund to help communities develop affordable housing. She has not said where the money for these programs would come from. – Scott Horsley

7. “He doesn't actually fight for the middle class. Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends. And he will give them another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5 trillion to the national debt.”

While the 2017 tax cuts were skewed to the wealthy , it did cut taxes across the board.

Large parts of that tax cut are due to expire next year. Trump has proposed extending all of them, and while also calling for additional, unspecified tax cuts. Harris has proposed extending the tax cuts for everyone making less than $400,000 a year (97% of the population) while raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

Under the Biden-Harris administration, the IRS has also beefed up tax enforcement to ensure that wealthier people and businesses pay what they owe. GOP lawmakers have criticized that effort, and it would likely be reversed in a second Trump administration. Both Harris and Trump have proposed exempting tips from taxation. While popular with workers in the swing state of Nevada, where many people work in tip-heavy industries like casinos, the idea has serious problems. Unless the lost tax revenue were replaced somehow, it would create an even bigger budget deficit. It would treat one class of workers (tipped employees) differently from all other workers. And it would invite gamesmanship as other workers tried to have part of their own income reclassified as tax-free tips. Depending on how the exemptions were structured, it could also result in lower retirement benefits for tipped workers. – Scott Horsley

8. “And all the while he intends to enact what, in effect, is a national sales tax? Call it a Trump tax that would raise prices on middle class families by almost $4,000 a year.”

This appears to be a reference to tariffs. Donald Trump raised tariffs sharply while he was in office, and he’s pledged to go further if he returns to the White House. During his first term, Trump imposed tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, washing machines, solar panels and numerous products from China. Many trading partners retaliated, slapping tariffs of their own on U.S. exports. Farmers and manufacturers suffered.

Despite the fallout, the Biden/Harris administration has left most of the Trump tariffs in place, while adding its own, additional levies on targeted goods from China such as electric vehicles. In a second term, Trump has proposed adding a 10% tariff on all imports, with a much higher levy on all Chinese goods. Researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimate such import taxes would cost the average family $1,700 a year. – Scott Horsley

9. “This is what's happening in our country because of Donald Trump. And understand he is not done as a part of his agenda. He and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban with or without Congress. And get this, get this – he plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women's miscarriages and abortions.”

It is accurate to point out that the lack of abortion access across the country for millions of women particularly in the South is directly because of Trump and his decision to appoint three conservative justices to the Supreme Court who voted to overturn Roe . As president, he sided with employers , who for religious or moral reasons, didn’t want to pay for contraception, as he tried to change the mandate that contraception be paid for under the Affordable Care Act.

But it’s unclear what Trump will do again as president. He has made conflicting comments about access to contraception. Harris’s charges about an “agenda” again seem to be based on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 . It would be accurate to warn that it’s possible, if not likely, Trump would take up the recommendations given that people close to Trump were instrumental in writing it and given that in his first term as president, he adopted many of the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations. But it’s not entirely accurate to say “he plans to create” these things when Trump himself and his campaign have not advocated for this. Trump himself has said that abortion should be left up to the states – and insisted that he doesn’t support a national ban.

10. “With this election, we finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.”

This is another one of those traps politicians fall into – overpromising when it’s not something they can control. Harris needs Congress to do this, and her winning the presidency does not guarantee that any of what she wants done legislatively will get done, even if Democrats take control of both chambers.

11. “Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades.”

While Donald Trump stood in the way of this bill passing, and it had been written with conservative Republicans, it’s not accurate to say this was the “strongest border bill in decades” unless you count 11 years as decades. The 2013 comprehensive immigration overhaul that got 68 votes in the Senate and was killed by the GOP House, did far more than this bill did.

12. “He encouraged Putin to invade our allies, said Russia could quote, do whatever the hell they want.”

While an alarming thing for an American president to say about a NATO ally, this is lacking in some context. Trump said he would say Russia could “do whatever the hell it wanted” – and Trump would not defend an ally – if that country didn’t “pay.” Trump continues to get wrong, however, that no countries in the alliance “pay” anything to anyone except themselves. What Trump is talking about is NATO countries’ goals of funding their own defense to 2% of their gross domestic product. But not defending a country from a hostile invasion would violate Article 5 of the 1949 treaty that binds the countries in battle and was created as a way to thwart any potential efforts by the former Soviet Union to expand beyond its borders.

It reads : “[I]f a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked.”

It has been invoked once: After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.

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COVID-19 Thesis Impact Statement

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on all aspects of our lives is well known.

Victoria experienced six lockdowns between March 2020 and October 2021 that collectively totalled 262 days. Deakin University sought to mitigate this impact on the research by higher degree by research students in various ways, including providing priority access to laboratories and support to pivot research projects. Not all impact on research could be mitigated with direct and indirect effects of limited domestic and international travel, closed university campuses and restricted in-person access to human research participants.

Within this context, you have the option of describing the impact of COVID-19 on your research and how you modified your topic, methods and data collection due to COVID-19 restrictions. The COVID-19 Thesis Impact Statement aims to provide the examiners with a clearer understanding of how the research was affected and shaped due to COVID-19 disruptions.

A COVID-19 Thesis Impact Statement is not required and you may submit your thesis for examination without reference to the COVID-19 pandemic. Should you wish to submit your thesis with a COVID-19 Thesis Impact Statement, do so only under the advice of your supervisory panel.

Please note that you may opt to include a COVID-19 Thesis Impact Statement for examination and remove it from your library copy but you cannot do the reverse. A COVID-19 Thesis Impact Statement cannot be included in your library copy if it wasn’t included in the examination copy.

Content of a COVID-19 Thesis Impact Statement

Following is some examples and advice of what and what not to include in your COVID-19 Thesis Impact Statement.

• How your planned research activities such as topic, research question, methods and data collection and/or the scope of your research were disrupted or changed due the pandemic. For instance: inability to conduct fieldwork or face-to-face research; access to facilities such as labs, archives or other working spaces; inability to collect or analyse data due to travel restrictions.
• How the research was shaped by the disruption: the actions or decisions taken to mitigate the disruption; new focus; revised research questions or development; pivoting or adjusting the research project.
• Any other relevant factors relating to the impact of the COVID-19 disruption on your research.
• Ensure that you do not infer that your thesis is of a lower standard due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Your COVID-19 Thesis Impact Statement should not address any effect on your personal circumstances.

Format of a COVID-19 Thesis Impact Statement

You may choose to include the statement as an upfront additional page in your thesis and/or address the impact within the content of the thesis.

If placed as a separate page at the beginning of your thesis, it should be no more than 600 words.

We encourage you to discuss with your supervisor the format of a COVID-19 Thesis Impact Statement that best fits your thesis and impact on your research.

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Thesis Submission Guidance: COVID-19 Impact Statement

In response to the impact of the global pandemic, we’re giving you the option to include a statement at the start of your thesis which outlines the effects that COVID-19 may have had on the research that you have undertaken towards your doctoral degree.

The inclusion of a statement is to facilitate the reader’s awareness, both now and in the future, that the pandemic may have had an effect on the scope, direction and presentation of the research.

The academic standards and quality threshold for the award remains unchanged. Where statements are included, you should be reassured that this is not evidencing a lack of original research or intellectual rigour.

If you decide to include one such statement, it should appear on the first page of the thesis, after the cover page, and be titled ‘Impact of COVID-19’. The statement should not exceed 1000 words and will not count towards the total thesis word count.

Examples of potential areas for consideration and comment when developing your impact statement are below. However, you should discuss the content of the statement with your supervisor before submission:

• Details on how disruption caused by COVID-19 has impacted the research (for example, an inability to conduct face to face research, an inability to collect/analyse data as a result of travel constraints, or restricted access to labs or other working spaces).
• A description of how the planned work would have fitted within the thesis narrative (e.g., through method development, expansion of analytical skills or advancement of hypotheses).
• A summary of any decisions / actions taken to mitigate for any work or data collection/analyses that were prevented by COVID-19.
• Highlighting new research questions and developments, emphasising the work that has been undertaken in pivoting or adjusting the project.

You are reminded of the public nature of the published thesis and the longevity of any such included statements about the impact of the pandemic. You are advised to take a cautious approach as to the insertion of any personal information in these statements.

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Examples of COVID-19 Impact Statements

This brief includes examples of how faculty members can strategically describe the impact of COVID-19 on their teaching, service, and research, scholarship, and/or creative activities. The two primary mechanisms by which UMD faculty members can describe the impact of COVID-19 on their work are in faculty activities reporting ( Faculty Success ) and in optional COVID-19 Impact Statements submitted in promotion materials [2] .

The point of explaining COVID-19 impacts is to highlight new or ongoing invisible labor and to show how a faculty member’s research, teaching, and service changed, in quality and quantity, in ways that are not typically recorded on a CV. Making this visible and offering contextual information may be useful to the faculty member. No one is required to offer personal narratives or supplemental information they suspect will disadvantage them. Every faculty member will decide whether to provide this optional information in the system, to keep track of it elsewhere (in case a unit head asks later), or not to compile it at all. The intent is not to force unwanted work on any faculty but rather to enable people to record in an ongoing strategic way their activities, again, including activities not included on a CV.

Examples of new, alternative, or extra effort in teaching, service, and research

• As a PTK faculty member working in a lab, I coordinated my lab’s staff planning for return to campus in July 2020, which included approximately 40 hours spent creating safety protocols, attending safety training, developing a lab rotation, procuring supplies, and setting up the space with COVID-19 safety precautions in mind. I disseminated this information to all lab personnel, including 1 postdoc, 3 staff members, and three graduate students. These protocols were subsequently adopted by two other units in my college.
• Within my lab, from March 2020 - December 2020, I organized monthly online trivia competitions on historical and contemporary topics relevant to my field to foster a greater sense of community among lab staff. These meetings included two postdocs, 4 doctoral research assistants, and 4 undergraduate researchers and involved approximately 2 hours per month in preparation or in the actual meeting.
• I had already received IRB approval for conducting ethnographic research in Brazil, but could not travel; and the community I planned to study had little computer or internet access. I therefore spent five months exploring “studying up” methodology and doing preliminary research and writing on international NGOs engaged in protecting rainforests; got IRB approval for the new project, and have done pilot interviews, via Zoom, with six activists and policy-makers.
• I served on the department’s newly created caregiving committee, which met once a week for 12 weeks to discuss accommodations that could be made within the department related to the extra burden to faculty and staff in caregiving roles during the pandemic.
• As the director for undergraduate studies, I led the transition of all campus visits to the virtual environment, including training 10 undergraduate student ambassadors on how to host virtual campus visits for incoming students.
• I facilitated 3 departmental listening sessions on the climate for Black students in May and June of this year after the protests for racial justice. I have subsequently hosted two zoom sessions from noted diversity, equity, and inclusion experts in our field to give department members strategies for enhancing DEI in their classrooms.
• In fall 2020 I taught ADVN101, which enrolled 25 undergraduate students. Typically, I would have had in-person office hours for a total of four hours per week. As a result of the pandemic, I have made myself available for zoom consultations with students approximately ten hours a week, thereby increasing my “in-person” hours with students by 150% this semester.
• In summer 2020, I supervised 3 graduate student independent studies in a hybrid modality, primarily as a way to ensure that they met the criteria for in-person credit hours. I met with them for two hours each week to supervise and advise on the creation of a study using extant data because they were unable to conduct research in the lab. Students in this independent study conducted a group research project that examined diversity of the field using extant data (e.g., Department of Education statistics, reports from disciplinary associations). They presented their findings at our national association’s meeting in November.
• I participated in 5 workshops through my professional association and the National Academies for Science, Engineering, and Medicine related to inclusive pedagogy and high-quality teaching in the virtual environment. I participated in five college-wide sessions on strategies for online engagement, and I led a sixth session in use of clickers to liven up Zoom sessions.
• I attended four Office of Diversity and Inclusion anti-racism workshops and subsequently adopted several practices within my classroom: (1) I conducted a diversity audit of the authors on the syllabus for ADVN305 and, having observed the underrepresentation of BIPOC authors, I adjusted the syllabus to include a diversity of scholars; (2) I shifted two assignments that had previously been multiple choice exams to assignments based upon the principles of labor-based grading; (3) I implemented a statement of mutual expectations for students and instructors. This document articulates the shared principals that all members of the classroom agreed upon (e.g., mutual respect, emphasis on community, expectations for timely communication).
• As a PTK instructional faculty member, I usually teach three sections a semester, with 30 students per section. After my department determined that the nature of the class made online teaching of that many students simultaneously impossible. At my department chair’s request, I agreed to teach six sections with 15 students each, so although the amount of grading was the same, I spent twice as many hours in actual class meetings. One section was early in the morning, to accommodate students in Asia, and one section was at night, to accommodate students who had to share computers with younger siblings and/or parents also learning/working from home.

Mentoring / Advising

• As the only Latina faculty member in the department, I serve as an informal advisor to additional 5 Latinx undergraduate students who have sought mentorship. I meet with them as a group once a semester (previously in person, but now via zoom) and have 1-2 meetings with each student per semester as requested to give advice on career and professional development.
• As an advisor, I held once monthly graduate student happy hours via zoom from March 2020 -- December 2020 (approximately 20 hours). These meetings included 4 masters students and 5 doctoral students.
• Several of my advisees have reported significant mental health and/or financial need as a result of the pandemic. I have increased the frequency at which I am available for one-on-one checkins with my advisees, meeting with each doctoral student (4) on a bi-weekly basis (compared to once a semester before the pandemic). I additionally consulted with the campus counseling center regarding resources available to students.

EXAMPLES OF NARRATIVES

Impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion work.

In the wake of the protests for racial justice, I led several informal meetings of graduate and undergraduate students to discuss the diversity climate in the department, college, and university at large. I had 5 one-on-one discussions and three large group meetings. I communicated feedback to our department chair and, with two faculty colleagues, two graduate students, and four undergraduates, formed the departmental equity taskforce. We have drafted a statement of our commitments to antiracism in the department and subsequently held a departmental town hall regarding the diversity, equity, and inclusion climate in the department. We have contracted a graduate student to conduct a climate survey; our committee will use the results to assess best next steps.

Impact of COVID-19 on Research

My lab was closed from March - May 2020, when typically, I would have been running experiments. Instead I investigated several federal grant possibilities, and ultimately I applied for two grants of $500,000 each. I have already learned that I won one grant and the second application was approved to move on to the second stage of peer review. I anticipate hearing the second decision in March 2021. My three school-age children were in school from home, so I did my grading, writing, and data analysis at night. Over the late summer and fall I submitted three papers to top journals in my field. Ordinarily, peer reviews for these journals take two or three months, but because peer reviewers themselves are very busy, all three editors have said that the peer review process will take five to six months.

Adapting Grant or Programs to COVID-19 Context

I oversaw the transition of all grant-sponsored educational programs (parental engagement workshops, teacher professional development) that were intended to be delivered in person to the online environment. Successfully transitioning all of our curriculum to an online platform included developing a new, web-based interactive curriculum that enhanced parent efficacy in facilitating student literacy at home and a three-part workshop for teachers about fostering positive interactions with parents in the virtual learning environment. Initial evaluation results indicate that the online intervention has been successful, with participants reporting a 10% increase pre to post in their efficacy. Although we saw some program attrition, overall the results indicate extra effort in this area brought positive results.

York Graduate Research School

Covid impact statement

An optional impact statement to explain to your examiners how your project/thesis has changed as a consequence of Covid-19 restrictions.

Many PGRs will have had to adapt their research project, sometimes significantly, in response to Covid-19 restrictions and this may be a cause of concern. Be reassured that adapting research projects in the light of unforeseen circumstances is a normal part of research and you will not be disadvantaged for doing so, as long as you are still able to meet the criteria for the relevant award ( section 2 of the Policy on Research Degrees ).

If you believe the pandemic is having or has had a significant negative impact on your personal circumstances (for example, led to ill-health or a challenging domestic situation) you should request a  leave of absence  or  extension  on those grounds. As always, you can seek independent advice from the Graduate Student's Association advice team.

Challenges and context

If you started on or before 31 March 2021 and will submit from December 2020 onwards, you will have the option of submitting a short impact statement to give contextual information about the effect of the Covid-19 restrictions on your research project/thesis. Submitted statements will be shared by PGR Administration with your examiners, who may explore the statement in an oral examination.

The statement enables you to explain challenges, for example:

• difficulty or delay in collecting or analysing data due to the closure of/restrictions on laboratories/other specialist facilities/expertise, curtailed/cancelled fieldwork due to travel restrictions or social distancing measures
• reduced data in one or more theis chapters, and/or thesis chapters that are shorter and/or not as closely linked as might be expected

You can also explain how the planned (i.e. pre-Covid-19 restrictions) research would have fitted into the thesis’ narrative and the steps you took to address the challenges arising from the Covid-19 restrictions, in terms of adjusting the scope, design or phasing of their research project/thesis, for example:

• one or more changes of research topic
• a change in emphasis from empirical to theoretical research
• a change of research location (fieldwork, archive, etc)
• a change a method (e.g. running experiments remotely rather than in person, using simulation, moving from in-person data collection to online data collection, analysing existing data sets)
• altering the timing of, or substituting, one or more experiments.

Submit an impact statement

You should complete the impact statement just before you submit your thesis for examination. Please upload the completed impact statement (as a PDF file) with your thesis.

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Persuasive Essay Guide

Persuasive Essay About Covid19

How to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid19 | Examples & Tips

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Are you looking to write a persuasive essay about the Covid-19 pandemic?

Writing a compelling and informative essay about this global crisis can be challenging. It requires researching the latest information, understanding the facts, and presenting your argument persuasively.

But don’t worry! with some guidance from experts, you’ll be able to write an effective and persuasive essay about Covid-19.

In this blog post, we’ll outline the basics of writing a persuasive essay . We’ll provide clear examples, helpful tips, and essential information for crafting your own persuasive piece on Covid-19.

Read on to get started on your essay.

• 1. Steps to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19
• 2. Examples of Persuasive Essay About COVID-19
• 3. Examples of Persuasive Essay About COVID-19 Vaccine
• 4. Examples of Persuasive Essay About COVID-19 Integration
• 5. Examples of Argumentative Essay About Covid 19
• 6. Examples of Persuasive Speeches About Covid-19
• 7. Tips to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19
• 8. Common Topics for a Persuasive Essay on COVID-19 

Steps to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19

Here are the steps to help you write a persuasive essay on this topic, along with an example essay:

Step 1: Choose a Specific Thesis Statement

Your thesis statement should clearly state your position on a specific aspect of COVID-19. It should be debatable and clear. For example:

Step 2: Research and Gather Information

Collect reliable and up-to-date information from reputable sources to support your thesis statement. This may include statistics, expert opinions, and scientific studies. For instance:

• COVID-19 vaccination effectiveness data
• Information on vaccine mandates in different countries
• Expert statements from health organizations like the WHO or CDC

Step 3: Outline Your Essay

Create a clear and organized outline to structure your essay. A persuasive essay typically follows this structure:

• Introduction
• Background Information
• Body Paragraphs (with supporting evidence)
• Counterarguments (addressing opposing views)

Step 4: Write the Introduction

In the introduction, grab your reader's attention and present your thesis statement. For example:

Step 5: Provide Background Information

Offer context and background information to help your readers understand the issue better. For instance:

Step 6: Develop Body Paragraphs

Each body paragraph should present a single point or piece of evidence that supports your thesis statement. Use clear topic sentences , evidence, and analysis. Here's an example:

Step 7: Address Counterarguments

Acknowledge opposing viewpoints and refute them with strong counterarguments. This demonstrates that you've considered different perspectives. For example:

Step 8: Write the Conclusion

Summarize your main points and restate your thesis statement in the conclusion. End with a strong call to action or thought-provoking statement. For instance:

Step 9: Revise and Proofread

Edit your essay for clarity, coherence, grammar, and spelling errors. Ensure that your argument flows logically.

Step 10: Cite Your Sources

Include proper citations and a bibliography page to give credit to your sources.

Remember to adjust your approach and arguments based on your target audience and the specific angle you want to take in your persuasive essay about COVID-19.

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Examples of Persuasive Essay About COVID-19

When writing a persuasive essay about the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s important to consider how you want to present your argument. To help you get started, here are some example essays for you to read:

Here is another example explaining How COVID-19 has changed our lives essay:

Let’s look at another sample essay:

Check out some more PDF examples below:

Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Pandemic

Sample Of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19

Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 In The Philippines - Example

If you're in search of a compelling persuasive essay on business, don't miss out on our “ persuasive essay about business ” blog!

Examples of Persuasive Essay About COVID-19 Vaccine

Covid19 vaccines are one of the ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but they have been a source of controversy. Different sides argue about the benefits or dangers of the new vaccines. Whatever your point of view is, writing a persuasive essay about it is a good way of organizing your thoughts and persuading others.

A persuasive essay about the COVID-19 vaccine could consider the benefits of getting vaccinated as well as the potential side effects.

Below are some examples of persuasive essays on getting vaccinated for Covid-19.

Covid19 Vaccine Persuasive Essay

Persuasive Essay on Covid Vaccines

Interested in thought-provoking discussions on abortion? Read our persuasive essay about abortion blog to eplore arguments!

Examples of Persuasive Essay About COVID-19 Integration

Covid19 has drastically changed the way people interact in schools, markets, and workplaces. In short, it has affected all aspects of life. However, people have started to learn to live with Covid19.

Writing a persuasive essay about it shouldn't be stressful. Read the sample essay below to get an idea for your own essay about Covid19 integration.

Persuasive Essay About Working From Home During Covid19

Searching for the topic of Online Education? Our persuasive essay about online education is a must-read.

Examples of Argumentative Essay About Covid 19

Covid-19 has been an ever-evolving issue, with new developments and discoveries being made on a daily basis.

Writing an argumentative essay about such an issue is both interesting and challenging. It allows you to evaluate different aspects of the pandemic, as well as consider potential solutions.

Here are some examples of argumentative essays on Covid19.

Argumentative Essay About Covid19 Sample

Argumentative Essay About Covid19 With Introduction Body and Conclusion

Looking for a persuasive take on the topic of smoking? You'll find it all related arguments in out Persuasive Essay About Smoking blog!

Examples of Persuasive Speeches About Covid-19

Do you need to prepare a speech about Covid19 and need examples? We have them for you!

Persuasive speeches about Covid-19 can provide the audience with valuable insights on how to best handle the pandemic. They can be used to advocate for specific changes in policies or simply raise awareness about the virus.

Check out some examples of persuasive speeches on Covid-19:

Persuasive Speech About Covid-19 Example

Persuasive Speech About Vaccine For Covid-19

You can also read persuasive essay examples on other topics to master your persuasive techniques!

Tips to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19

Writing a persuasive essay about COVID-19 requires a thoughtful approach to present your arguments effectively. 

Here are some tips to help you craft a compelling persuasive essay on this topic:

• Choose a Specific Angle: Narrow your focus to a specific aspect of COVID-19, like vaccination or public health measures.
• Provide Credible Sources: Support your arguments with reliable sources like scientific studies and government reports.
• Use Persuasive Language: Employ ethos, pathos, and logos , and use vivid examples to make your points relatable.
• Organize Your Essay: Create a solid persuasive essay outline and ensure a logical flow, with each paragraph focusing on a single point.
• Emphasize Benefits: Highlight how your suggestions can improve public health, safety, or well-being.
• Use Visuals: Incorporate graphs, charts, and statistics to reinforce your arguments.
• Call to Action: End your essay conclusion with a strong call to action, encouraging readers to take a specific step.
• Revise and Edit: Proofread for grammar, spelling, and clarity, ensuring smooth writing flow.
• Seek Feedback: Have someone else review your essay for valuable insights and improvements.

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Common Topics for a Persuasive Essay on COVID-19 

Here are some persuasive essay topics on COVID-19:

• The Importance of Vaccination Mandates for COVID-19 Control
• Balancing Public Health and Personal Freedom During a Pandemic
• The Economic Impact of Lockdowns vs. Public Health Benefits
• The Role of Misinformation in Fueling Vaccine Hesitancy
• Remote Learning vs. In-Person Education: What's Best for Students?
• The Ethics of Vaccine Distribution: Prioritizing Vulnerable Populations
• The Mental Health Crisis Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic
• The Long-Term Effects of COVID-19 on Healthcare Systems
• Global Cooperation vs. Vaccine Nationalism in Fighting the Pandemic
• The Future of Telemedicine: Expanding Healthcare Access Post-COVID-19

In search of more inspiring topics for your next persuasive essay? Our persuasive essay topics blog has plenty of ideas!

To sum it up,

You have read good sample essays and got some helpful tips. You now have the tools you needed to write a persuasive essay about Covid-19. So don't let the doubts stop you, start writing!

If you need professional writing help, don't worry! We've got that for you as well.

MyPerfectWords.com is a professional persuasive essay writing service that can help you craft an excellent persuasive essay on Covid-19. Our experienced essay writer will create a well-structured, insightful paper in no time!

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good title for a covid-19 essay.

A good title for a COVID-19 essay should be clear, engaging, and reflective of the essay's content. Examples include:

• "The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Health"
• "How COVID-19 Has Transformed Our Daily Lives"
• "COVID-19: Lessons Learned and Future Implications"

How do I write an informative essay about COVID-19?

To write an informative essay about COVID-19, follow these steps:

• Choose a specific focus: Select a particular aspect of COVID-19, such as its transmission, symptoms, or vaccines.
• Research thoroughly: Gather information from credible sources like scientific journals and official health organizations.
• Organize your content: Structure your essay with an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
• Present facts clearly: Use clear, concise language to convey information accurately.
• Include visuals: Use charts or graphs to illustrate data and make your essay more engaging.

How do I write an expository essay about COVID-19?

To write an expository essay about COVID-19, follow these steps:

• Select a clear topic: Focus on a specific question or issue related to COVID-19.
• Conduct thorough research: Use reliable sources to gather information.
• Create an outline: Organize your essay with an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
• Explain the topic: Use facts and examples to explain the chosen aspect of COVID-19 in detail.
• Maintain objectivity: Present information in a neutral and unbiased manner.
• Edit and revise: Proofread your essay for clarity, coherence, and accuracy.

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Graduate Research Hub

• Preparing my thesis
• Writing my thesis

Getting started on your thesis

The approach to writing will vary by discipline. The best way to make sure you are doing the right thing is to talk to your supervisors, plan the structure of your thesis and start writing early and regularly.

In creative arts disciplines where your thesis may take the form of creative works and a dissertation, you should also discuss the form and presentation of your thesis with your supervisor, to ensure that it is presented as a cohesive whole. You can refer to the thesis with creative works page for further information on formatting , weighting and the examination process for creative works.

Thesis formats, preface and word limits

The rules governing thesis content, language and word limits are contained in the Graduate Research Training Policy while the formatting and preface requirements for theses, compilations and creative works are provided in the Preparation of Graduate Research Theses Rules . You can also refer to the sample thesis title page .

If your thesis includes some of your publications, or material extracted from some of your publications, format requirements are explained under Including your published material in your thesis .

The University repository, Minerva Access , stores completed theses and is a good resource for viewing how others have presented their work. Just browse by types and choose Masters research thesis, PhD thesis or Doctorate .

You will need to add an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) to your thesis title page. Information on the ORCID and how to apply for one is available from the University Library

If your thesis includes third party copyright material, the Preparation of Graduate Research Theses Rules requires you to include a list of the material and whether or not you have gained permission from the copyright owners to make this material publicly available as part of your thesis. When creating the list, please use the Template for Listing Third Party Copyright Material . For further information on copyright and dealing with the copyright of others, see Copyright & Research .

Check the Handbook entry for your course for specific word limits and, where applicable, for the proportion of the thesis to be presented as a creative work.

The maximum word limit for theses (including footnotes but excluding tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices) are:

• 50 000 words for Masters theses
• 100 000 words for a PhD or doctoral thesis.

You should aim to write a thesis shorter than the maximum allowed, for example 40 000 for a Masters thesis or 80 000 words for a PhD. Any thesis that exceeds the maximum limit requires permission to proceed to examination, which must be sought via the Graduate Research Examinations Office prior to submission.

It may have been necessary for you to significantly alter your research plan, due the COVID-19 pandemic or other major disruption. In some cases, this may mean that the thesis you submit is not typical for your discipline. In your thesis, you should discuss any methodological changes you have made and explain how the changes arose because of the disruptions. Theses usually also include discussion of possible future research; you may wish to outline research that could be done once conditions change. Your discussion in the thesis of COVID-19 or other impacts will guide the examiners’ understanding of the reported work and the environment in which it was undertaken.

Acknowledging COVID-19 disruptions in your thesis

This guide discusses how to explain the impact of COVID-19 disruptions in your thesis. You should consult with your supervisors to decide what approach suits your situation best.

What to include or exclude

When you include statements within your PhD, other than in the Acknowledgements, they must be objective and within the scope of matters that examiners consider. You can include statements about the impact of COVID-19 or other significant external disruptions on matters such as the scope of the thesis; experimental design; or access to resources including facilities, collections, cohorts of experimental subjects, fieldwork, laboratories, and performance spaces. Note this list is indicative only. If in doubt, contact your supervisor or advisory committee chair about other relevant inclusions.

It is not appropriate to include emotional statements, how your experience compared to others (examination is not competitive), nor impacts such as the need to work remotely, or personal statements on mental or physical health, family, finances, nor the behaviour or availability of supervisors. Examiners are not asked to consider these matters.

While these factors may have had a profound impact on many candidates during the disruptions, there is no concept of ‘special consideration’ in examination of theses. Challenges to candidature are expected to be managed prior to submission and are not considered by examiners. For example, if access to supervisors was a difficulty, alternative arrangements should have been made. Examiners are not asked to make allowance for such factors.

Major changes to the project

If the disruptions led to significant changes to your project, you could address this in a single location.

For example, you might include a section that addresses the impact that the disruptions had on the entire thesis, or on multiple chapters within the thesis in a systematic and explicit way.

The introduction is where candidates lay out the thesis for examiners and so provides an opportunity to present objective statements regarding the impact of COVID-19 on the thesis. If the disruptions meant that different methodologies were pursued in different parts of the thesis, the introduction is a good place to explain why in a cohesive way.

Alternatively, statements can be added to the preface, to provide context to the work as a whole.

A final conclusions chapter is used to summarise the work and outline future research opportunities. If the disruption prevented you from undertaking particular research activities, you can use this section to highlight these gaps in the study and how they might be addressed.

Carefully explaining how the methodology was shaped by the disruption demonstrates your capacity to think beyond the PhD and to adapt to changing conditions. It can show that you are creative, flexible, and exploratory as a problem-solver.

The skills expected of a strong candidate include an ability to formulate a viable research question and to analyse information critically within and across a changing disciplinary environment.

You have the opportunity to demonstrate these attributes, even if the investigative component of the research was impeded. Remember that the core goal is research training, not the achievement of specific research outcomes.

Impact on specific chapters

If the disruptions impacted just one or two chapters of your thesis, they still need to stand alone as quality research.

One option is to explain the original design and how it was revised, either in the chapter introduction or in the section where it best fits in your narrative. It is important to explain to the examiners why you chose that methodology, particularly if it is unusual for your discipline. For example, the disruption may have affected the number or type of interviews that were conducted or have forced a change from experimental work to computational modelling.

Again, writing a focused discussion of the impact of the disruptions on a specific piece of work is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the qualities and skills that an examiner seeks in a strong candidate.

Impact that was not specific

You may wish to note that your thesis was completed during COVID-19 disruptions, even if there was no specific identifiable impact on the scope of the thesis or the project design. The appropriate location for this note is in the acknowledgements section because it is not examined. Remember that although this is the section where you might offer gratitude for family, friends, supervisors, inspirations, and supports; not every examiner will read the acknowledgements.

Editing my thesis

Your thesis must be your own work, and you must clearly understand your role as well as the roles of your supervisors and others throughout the editorial process.

The  Graduate Research Training Policy limits the editing of theses by others to that permitted in the current Guidelines for Editing Research Theses .

As editorial intervention (other than by your supervisors) should be restricted to copyediting and proofreading, as covered on page two of the Guidelines for Editing Research Theses , it is important that you understand the types of editing as explained on the Institute of Professional Editors Limited (IPEd) website.

The University does not maintain a list of editors. If you would like help finding a suitable editor, the Institute of Professional Editors Limited (IPEd) has a register of accredited editors.

If your thesis has had the benefit of editorial advice, in any form, you must provide the name of the editor or company providing the service and a brief description of the service rendered, in terms of the Standards, in the preface of your thesis.

Registering my intention to submit

Prior to submission, or prior to your performance or exhibition of a creative component of your thesis, register your intention to submit by logging into the Thesis Examination System (TES). About 2-months prior to your submission is the ideal time for this. Your estimated submission date, or your thesis submission date, must not exceed your maximum submission date, i.e. your expected thesis submission date as listed on the Graduate Research Details page of my.unimelb .

Registering your intention to submit begins the process of the selection of examiners. You will need to provide a brief (80-word) overview of your research question, methods and results which will be sent to potential examiners. If you are submitting a thesis with creative work, include the weighting of the proportion of the written dissertation and creative component/s. You will also be given the opportunity to name up to two people that you consider to be unsuitable examiners, along with substantiated reasons. You are encouraged to create and enter an ORCID .

Preparing to submit your thesis soon? Download our Thesis Submission Checklist to assist you.

More information

Read the  FAQs on using the Thesis Examination System

You must be admitted to the relevant graduate research degree in order to submit your thesis. If your candidature is suspended, cancelled or terminated and you wish to submit, you must first  apply for reinstatement and readmission . Before applying for readmission you should contact your supervisor or head of department to discuss your thesis. If your supervisor is no longer available please contact  the  graduate research team for your faculty , or the faculty nearest in discipline to your former department.

Resources and workshops to help you write

• Writing skills
• Publication, open access and copyright
• Library skills for researchers
• Systems and tech tools including - Nvivo, LabArchives, File Management 101, Producing excellent graphs and sessions for a range of reference management software
• Communication skills and presentation skills workshops including - Oral presentations, Working with people and managing complex relationships and Working with a supervisor
• Upcoming workshops offered by Research@Library including digital skills webinars.
• Melbourne talks - a free program for international graduate researchers to the University of Melbourne delivered by the Student Peer Leader Network in partnership with Academic Skills.
• The University’s Library Guides provide a resource of library research support information on research, reading and writing skills
• We recommend you watch the series of eight short videos on Getting Started with Library Research
• The Eastern Resource Centre Library will be regularly updated to include information on when they are hosting structured social writing sessions known as ‘shut up and write’ and library information sessions
• Connect to the  Thesis Writers’ Community on LMS. Established by Academic Skills, the Community provides information and support through the writing process for graduate researchers
• You can join GSA’s regular Shut Up & Write sessions and Shut Up & Write-a-Thons
• Book an adviser for individual appointments to help with your thesis
• Your graduate school may have writing groups and they may offer 'boot camps' for an intensive writing effort. GSA also runs regular thesis boot camps .
• You may also find it helpful to look at theses from past candidates in your field.  You can use the Browse “Communities and Collections” function in the University's institutional publications repository,  Minerva Access to find the “Theses” collection for your faculty or department (use the “+” symbol to expand the list of communities available).  You can also use the search function to find theses with relevant keywords.
• Annual graduate research competitions organised by the University such as the Three minute thesis (3MT®) competition and  Visualise your thesis competition 

Please note: These programs and workshops are subject to change, based on bookings and demand.

• Resources for candidates
• Orientation and induction
• Mapping my degree
• Principles for infrastructure support
• Peer activities
• Change my commencement date
• Meeting expectations
• Working with my supervisors
• Responsible Research & Research Integrity
• Outside institutions list
• Guidelines for external supervisors
• Pre-confirmation
• Confirmation
• At risk of unsatisfactory progress
• Unsatisfactory progress
• Add or drop coursework subjects
• Apply for leave
• Return from leave
• Apply for Study Away
• Return from Study Away
• Change my study rate
• Check my candidature status
• Change my current supervisors
• Request an evidence of enrolment or evidence of qualification statement
• Change my project details
• Change department
• Transfer to another graduate research degree
• Late submission
• Withdraw from my research degree
• Check the status of a request
• Re-enrolment
• Advice on requesting changes
• Extension of candidature
• Lapse candidature
• How to cancel a form in my.unimelb
• Resolving issues
• Taking leave
• About Study Away
• Finishing on time
• Accepting an offer for a joint PhD online
• Tenured Study Spaces (TSS) Usage Guidelines
• Tenured Study Spaces Procedures
• Research skills
• Academic writing and communication skills
• Building professional and academic networks
• Research internships
• Commercialising my research
• Supplementary PhD Programs
• Examples of thesis and chapter formats when including publications
• Thesis with creative works
• Research Integrity in my Thesis
• Graduate researchers and digital assistance tools
• TES Statuses
• Submitting my thesis
• Depositing multiple components for your final thesis record
• The Chancellor's Prize
• TES Graduate Researcher FAQs
• Career planning
• Publishing my research
• Getting support
• Key graduate research contacts
• Melbourne Research Experience Survey
• Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT)
• Current Students

• Faculty/Staff
• MyMichiganTech
• Safety Data Sheets
• Website Settings

COVID Impact Statements

Pandemic impact checklist to simplify drafting a covid impact statement.

The purpose of the COVID Impact Statement is to provide reviewers the information that they need to perform a fair, contextualized review of the faculty member’s performance and contributions. Click here for a printable pdf . Another resource with examples is here .  Dr. Rebecca Ong wrote a blog post for the Unscripted Research Blog. In it she details the chain reaction caused by COVID in Tech's research labs. She also offers solutions that can be used in combination with our suggestions below.

 The COVID Impact Statement (modified from University of Texas at Austin ):

• Should not contain ANY specific personal information (e.g., dependent care inaccessibility challenges, personal or dependents’ health information, etc.).
• Should include time period ONLY (not the reason) for any approved medical or personal leaves, if applicable.
• Should describe the faculty member’s workload, performance and trajectory prior to COVID.
• Should describe the impact COVID has had on workload, performance and trajectory in the areas of research/creativity, teaching, and service.
• Should describe how the faculty member has adjusted or plans to adjust their work in light of COVID to continue or re-build their trajectory.
• Should not be longer than one page (~500 words) in order to ensure that it is read carefully by others.
• May detail different kinds of professional impact on faculty work (negative and/or positive).

Sources: Gannon CHE 2021 ; Shuman CHE 2021  

Sample language provided overlaps between categories.  Please use the examples that apply to you and edit to avoid repetitiveness and/or overlap. You do not need to include language for every possible checklist item. 

Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities

At the end of the description of each impact, you may want to add the following, as appropriate:

• My plans for getting back on track are… 
• Long term impacts of this delay that are not recoverable include….

Teaching & Mentoring

• This limited time available for other scholarly/teaching responsibilities. 
• My plans for getting back on track are…

• My plans for rebalancing my time are…

• The University of Texas at Austin, College of Natural Resources, Writing a COVID Impact Statement , accessed Aug 2021.
• Michigan Tech Spring 2021 survey, Conducted by Vice President for Research Office and Office of the Provost.
• Gannon, Kevin, “Faculty Evaluation After the Pandemic: In our post-Covid personnel landscape, one-size-fits-all tenure and promotion policies are destined to fall short.” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2021 . 
• Schuman, Rebecca, “Now I Have to Write a ‘Covid Impact Statement’?: An academic-writing specialist answers your questions on pandemic-productivity quandaries.” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2021 .
• Skinner, M., Betancourt, N., & Wolff-Eisenberg, C. “The Disproportionate Impact of the Pandemic on Women and Caregivers in Academia.” https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.315147 Ithaka S+R. March 2021.
• Simula, Brandy L. Simula and Willink, Kate.  “Navigating the Continuing Psychological Pandemic: How academic leaders can help support faculty through the pandemic's next phase (opinion) .” Inside Higher Ed, July, 2021
• Misra, Joya; Clark, Dessie; and Mickey, Ethel L.,  “Keeping COVID-19 From Sidelining Equity: Without intentional interventions, the pandemic will make higher education less diverse and equitable (opinion) ” Inside Higher Ed, February 2021
• Cardel, M. I., Dean, N., & Montoya-Williams, D. (2020). “Preventing a Secondary Epidemic of Lost Early Career Scientists: Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic on Women with Children.”  Annals of the American Thoracic Society, (ja). https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1513/AnnalsATS.202006-589IP  
• Flaherty, Colleen, “ Where and how gender and caregiving intersect for professors during COVID-19 : It's not just about gender or caregiving, it's both: new analyses suggest colleges need COVID-19 faculty relief policies that target female caregivers in particular.” Inside Higher Ed, February 2021
• Fulweiler RW, Davies SW, Biddle JF, Burgin AJ, Cooperdock EHG, et al. (2021) “Rebuild the Academy: Supporting academic mothers during COVID-19 and beyond.” PLOS Biology 19 (3): e3001100. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001100  
• Malisch, J. et al. (2020). “In the Wake of COVID‐19, Academia Needs New Solutions to Ensure Gender Equity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” 117(27), 15378-15381. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2010636117  
• Supporting information https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2020/06/17/2010636117.DCSupplemental/pnas.2010636117.sapp.pdf

Other Resources:

Iowa State University's COVID Impact Statement guidance: " Best Practices for Documenting the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Faculty Workload "

Applying an Equity Lens to COVID Impact Statements : "Documenting the pandemic’s effect, especially on women faculty and those of color, is vital, write Donna Riley and Mangala Subramaniam, who offer advice on how to assess such statements."

Potentially long-lasting effects of the pandemic on scientists (Nature): Two surveys of principal investigators conducted between April 2020 and January 2021 reveal that while the COVID-19 pandemic’s initial impacts on scientists’ research time seem alleviated, there has been a decline in the rate of initiating new projects. See also:  The pandemic’s slowing of research productivity may last years—especially for women and parents (Science)

Michigan Tech is a globally recognized technological university that educates students, advances knowledge, and innovates to improve the quality of life and to promote mutual respect and equity for all people within the state, the nation, and the global community. 

MTU Strategic Planning Framework for DEIS

Students’ Essays on Infectious Disease Prevention, COVID-19 Published Nationwide

As part of the BIO 173: Global Change and Infectious Disease course, Professor Fred Cohan assigns students to write an essay persuading others to prevent future and mitigate present infectious diseases. If students submit their essay to a news outlet—and it’s published—Cohan awards them with extra credit.

As a result of this assignment, more than 25 students have had their work published in newspapers across the United States. Many of these essays cite and applaud the University’s Keep Wes Safe campaign and its COVID-19 testing protocols.

Cohan, professor of biology and Huffington Foundation Professor in the College of the Environment (COE), began teaching the Global Change and Infectious Disease course in 2009, when the COE was established. “I wanted very much to contribute a course to what I saw as a real game-changer in Wesleyan’s interest in the environment. The course is about all the ways that human demands on the environment have brought us infectious diseases, over past millennia and in the present, and why our environmental disturbances will continue to bring us infections into the future.”

Over the years, Cohan learned that he can sustainably teach about 170 students every year without running out of interested students. This fall, he had 207. Although he didn’t change the overall structure of his course to accommodate COVID-19 topics, he did add material on the current pandemic to various sections of the course.

“I wouldn’t say that the population of the class increased tremendously as a result of COVID-19, but I think the enthusiasm of the students for the material has increased substantially,” he said.

To accommodate online learning, Cohan shaved off 15 minutes from his normal 80-minute lectures to allow for discussion sections, led by Cohan and teaching assistants. “While the lectures mostly dealt with biology, the discussions focused on how changes in behavior and policy can solve the infectious disease problems brought by human disturbance of the environment,” he said.

Based on student responses to an introspective exam question, Cohan learned that many students enjoyed a new hope that we could each contribute to fighting infectious disease. “They discovered that the solution to infectious disease is not entirely a waiting game for the right technologies to come along,” he said. “Many enjoyed learning about fighting infectious disease from a moral and social perspective. And especially, the students enjoyed learning about the ‘socialism of the microbe,’ how preventing and curing others’ infections will prevent others’ infections from becoming our own. The students enjoyed seeing how this idea can drive both domestic and international health policies.”

A sampling of the published student essays are below:

Alexander Giummo ’22 and Mike Dunderdale’s ’23  op-ed titled “ A National Testing Proposal: Let’s Fight Back Against COVID-19 ” was published in the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

They wrote: “With an expansive and increased testing plan for U.S. citizens, those who are COVID-positive could limit the number of contacts they have, and this would also help to enable more effective contact tracing. Testing could also allow for the return of some ‘normal’ events, such as small social gatherings, sports, and in-person class and work schedules.

“We propose a national testing strategy in line with the one that has kept Wesleyan students safe this year. The plan would require a strong push by the federal government to fund the initiative, but it is vital to successful containment of the virus.

“Twice a week, all people living in the U.S. should report to a local testing site staffed with professionals where the anterior nasal swab Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test, used by Wesleyan and supported by the Broad Institute, would be implemented.”

Kalyani Mohan ’22 and Kalli Jackson ’22 penned an essay titled “ Where Public Health Meets Politics: COVID-19 in the United States ,” which was published in Wesleyan’s Arcadia Political Review .

They wrote: “While the U.S. would certainly benefit from a strengthened pandemic response team and structural changes to public health systems, that alone isn’t enough, as American society is immensely stratified, socially and culturally. The politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic shows that individualism, libertarianism and capitalism are deeply ingrained in American culture, to the extent that Americans often blind to the fact community welfare can be equivalent to personal welfare. Pandemics are multifaceted, and preventing them requires not just a cultural shift but an emotional one amongst the American people, one guided by empathy—towards other people, different communities and the planet. Politics should be a tool, not a weapon against its people.”

Sydnee Goyer ’21 and Marcel Thompson’s ’22  essay “ This Flu Season Will Be Decisive in the Fight Against COVID-19 ” also was published in Arcadia Political Review .

“With winter approaching all around the Northern Hemisphere, people are preparing for what has already been named a “twindemic,” meaning the joint threat of the coronavirus and the seasonal flu,” they wrote. “While it is known that seasonal vaccinations reduce the risk of getting the flu by up to 60% and also reduce the severity of the illness after the contamination, additional research has been conducted in order to know whether or not flu shots could reduce the risk of people getting COVID-19. In addition to the flu shot, it is essential that people remain vigilant in maintaining proper social distancing, washing your hands thoroughly, and continuing to wear masks in public spaces.”

An op-ed titled “ The Pandemic Has Shown Us How Workplace Culture Needs to Change ,” written by Adam Hickey ’22 and George Fuss ’21, was published in Park City, Utah’s The Park Record .

They wrote: “One review of academic surveys (most of which were conducted in the United States) conducted in 2019 found that between 35% and 97% of respondents in those surveys reported having attended work while they were ill, often because of workplace culture or policy which generated pressure to do so. Choosing to ignore sickness and return to the workplace while one is ill puts colleagues at risk, regardless of the perceived severity of your own illness; COVID-19 is an overbearing reminder that a disease that may cause mild, even cold-like symptoms for some can still carry fatal consequences for others.

“A mandatory paid sick leave policy for every worker, ideally across the globe, would allow essential workers to return to work when necessary while still providing enough wiggle room for economically impoverished employees to take time off without going broke if they believe they’ve contracted an illness so as not to infect the rest of their workplace and the public at large.”

Women’s cross country team members and classmates Jane Hollander ’23 and Sara Greene ’23 wrote a sports-themed essay titled “ This Season, High School Winter Sports Aren’t Worth the Risk ,” which was published in Tap into Scotch Plains/Fanwood , based in Scotch Plains, N.J. Their essay focused on the risks high school sports pose on student-athletes, their families, and the greater community.

“We don’t propose cutting off sports entirely— rather, we need to be realistic about the levels at which athletes should be participating. There are ways to make practices safer,” they wrote. “At [Wesleyan], we began the season in ‘cohorts,’ so the amount of people exposed to one another would be smaller. For non-contact sports, social distancing can be easily implemented, and for others, teams can focus on drills, strength and conditioning workouts, and skill-building exercises. Racing sports such as swim and track can compete virtually, comparing times with other schools, and team sports can focus their competition on intra-team scrimmages. These changes can allow for the continuation of a sense of normalcy and team camaraderie without the exposure to students from different geographic areas in confined, indoor spaces.”

Brook Guiffre ’23 and Maddie Clarke’s ’22  op-ed titled “ On the Pandemic ” was published in Hometown Weekly,  based in Medfield, Mass.

“The first case of COVID-19 in the United States was recorded on January 20th, 2020. For the next month and a half, the U.S. continued operating normally, while many other countries began their lockdown,” they wrote. “One month later, on February 29th, 2020, the federal government approved a national testing program, but it was too little too late. The U.S. was already in pandemic mode, and completely unprepared. Frontline workers lacked access to N-95 masks, infected patients struggled to get tested, and national leaders informed the public that COVID-19 was nothing more than the common flu. Ultimately, this unpreparedness led to thousands of avoidable deaths and long-term changes to daily life. With the risk of novel infectious diseases emerging in the future being high, it is imperative that the U.S. learn from its failure and better prepare for future pandemics now. By strengthening our public health response and re-establishing government organizations specialized in disease control, we have the ability to prevent more years spent masked and six feet apart.”

In addition, their other essay, “ On Mass Extinction ,” was also published by Hometown Weekly .

“The sixth mass extinction—which scientists have coined as the Holocene Extinction—is upon us. According to the United Nations, around one million plant and animal species are currently in danger of extinction, and many more within the next decade. While other extinctions have occurred in Earth’s history, none have occurred at such a rapid rate,” they wrote. “For the sake of both biodiversity and infectious diseases, it is in our best interest to stop pushing this Holocene Extinction further.”

An essay titled “ Learning from Our Mistakes: How to Protect Ourselves and Our Communities from Diseases ,” written by Nicole Veru ’21 and Zoe Darmon ’21, was published in My Hometown Bronxville, based in Bronxville, N.Y.

“We can protect ourselves and others from future infectious diseases by ensuring that we are vaccinated,” they wrote. “Vaccines have high levels of success if enough people get them. Due to vaccines, society is no longer ravaged by childhood diseases such as mumps, rubella, measles, and smallpox. We have been able to eradicate diseases through vaccines; smallpox, one of the world’s most consequential diseases, was eradicated from the world in the 1970s.

“In 2000, the U.S. was nearly free of measles, yet, due to hesitations by anti-vaxxers, there continues to be cases. From 2000–2015 there were over 18 measles outbreaks in the U.S. This is because unless a disease is completely eradicated, there will be a new generation susceptible.

“Although vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing infection, if we continue to get vaccinated, we protect ourselves and those around us. If enough people are vaccinated, societies can develop herd immunity. The amount of people vaccinated to obtain herd immunity depends on the disease, but if this fraction is obtained, the spread of disease is contained. Through herd immunity, we protect those who may not be able to get vaccinated, such as people who are immunocompromised and the tiny portion of people for whom the vaccine is not effective.”

Dhruvi Rana ’22 and Bryce Gillis ’22 co-authored an op-ed titled “ We Must Educate Those Who Remain Skeptical of the Dangers of COVID-19 ,” which was published in Rhode Island Central .

“As Rhode Island enters the winter season, temperatures are beginning to drop and many studies have demonstrated that colder weather and lower humidity are correlated with higher transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19,” they wrote. “By simply talking or breathing, we release respiratory droplets and aerosols (tiny fluid particles which could carry the coronavirus pathogen), which can remain in the air for minutes to hours.

“In order to establish herd immunity in the US, we must educate those who remain skeptical of the dangers of COVID-19.  Whether community-driven or state-funded, educational campaigns are needed to ensure that everyone fully comprehends how severe COVID-19 is and the significance of airborne transmission. While we await a vaccine, it is necessary now more than ever that we social distance, avoid crowds, and wear masks, given that colder temperatures will likely yield increased transmission of the virus.”

Danielle Rinaldi ’21 and Verónica Matos Socorro ’21 published their op-ed titled “ Community Forum: How Mask-Wearing Demands a Cultural Reset ” in the Ewing Observer , based in Lawrence, N.J.

“In their own attempt to change personal behavior during the pandemic, Wesleyan University has mandated mask-wearing in almost every facet of campus life,” they wrote. “As members of our community, we must recognize that mask-wearing is something we are all responsible and accountable for, not only because it is a form of protection for us, but just as important for others as well. However, it seems as though both Covid fatigue and complacency are dominating the mindsets of Americans, leading to even more unwillingness to mask up. Ultimately, it is inevitable that this pandemic will not be the last in our lifespan due to global warming creating irreversible losses in biodiversity. As a result, it is imperative that we adopt the norm of mask-wearing now and undergo a culture shift of the abandonment of an individualistic mindset, and instead, create a society that prioritizes taking care of others for the benefit of all.”

Shayna Dollinger ’22 and Hayley Lipson ’21  wrote an essay titled “ My Pandemic Year in College Has Brought Pride and Purpose. ” Dollinger submitted the piece, rewritten in first person, to Jewish News of Northern California . Read more about Dollinger’s publication in this News @ Wesleyan article .

“I lay in the dead grass, a 6-by-6-foot square all to myself. I cheer for my best friend, who is on the stage constructed at the bottom of Foss hill, dancing with her Bollywood dance group. Masks cover their ordinarily smiling faces as their bodies move in sync. Looking around at friends and classmates, each in their own 6-by-6 world, I feel an overwhelming sense of normalcy.

“One of the ways in which Wesleyan has prevented outbreaks on campus is by holding safe, socially distanced events that students want to attend. By giving us places to be and things to do on the weekends, we are discouraged from breaking rules and causing outbreaks at ‘super-spreader’ events.”

An op-ed written by Luna Mac-Williams ’22 and Daëlle Coriolan ’24 titled “ Collectivist Practices to Combat COVID-19 ” was published in the Wesleyan Argus .

“We are embroiled in a global pandemic that disproportionately affects poor communities of color, and in the midst of a higher cultural consciousness of systemic inequities,” they wrote. “A cultural shift to center collectivist thought and action not only would prove helpful in disease prevention, but also belongs in conversation with the Black Lives Matter movement. Collectivist models of thinking effectively target the needs of vulnerable populations including the sick, the disenfranchised, the systematically marginalized. Collectivist systems provide care, decentering the capitalist, individualist system, and focusing on how communities can work to be self-sufficient and uplift our own neighbors.”

An essay written by Maria Noto ’21 , titled “ U.S. Individualism Has Deadly Consequences ,” is published in the Oneonta Daily Star , based in Oneonta, N.Y.

She wrote, “When analyzing the cultures of certain East Asian countries, several differences stand out. For instance, when people are sick and during the cold and flu season, many East Asian cultures, including South Korea, use mask-wearing. What is considered a threat to freedom by some Americans is a preventive action and community obligation in this example. This, along with many other cultural differences, is insightful in understanding their ability to contain the virus.

“These differences are deeply seeded in the values of a culture. However, there is hope for the U.S. and other individualistic cultures in recognizing and adopting these community-centered approaches. Our mindset needs to be revolutionized with the help of federal and local assistance: mandating masks, passing another stimulus package, contact tracing, etc… However, these measures will be unsuccessful unless everyone participates for the good of a community.”

A published op-ed by Madison Szabo ’23 , Caitlyn Ferrante ’23 ran in the Two Rivers Times . The piece is titled “ Anxiety and Aspiration: Analyzing the Politicization of the Pandemic .”

John Lee ’21 and Taylor Goodman-Leong ’21 have published their op-ed titled “ Reassessing the media’s approach to COVID-19 ” in Weekly Monday Cafe 24 (Page 2).

An essay by Eleanor Raab ’21 and Elizabeth Nefferdorf ’22 titled “ Preventing the Next Epidemic ” was published in The Almanac .

• Keep Wes Safe
• student publications
• Teaching during the pandemic

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Home > Honors College > Honors Theses > 1912

Honors Theses

An analysis of the effects of covid-19 on students at the university of mississippi: family, careers, mental health.

Hannah Newbold Follow

Date of Award

Spring 5-1-2021

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Integrated Marketing Communication

First Advisor

Second advisor.

Cynthia Joyce

Third Advisor

Marquita Smith

Relational Format

Dissertation/Thesis

This study analyzes the effects of COVID-19 on students at the University of Mississippi. For students, COVID-19 changed the landscape of education, with classes and jobs going online. Students who graduated in May 2020 entered a poor job market and many ended up going to graduate school instead of finding a job. Access to medical and professional help was limited at the very beginning, with offices not taking patients or moving appointments to virtual only. This would require that each student needing help had to have access to quality internet service, which wasn’t always guaranteed, thus producing additional challenges.

These chapters, including a robust literature review of relevant sources, as well as a personal essay, consist further of interviews with students and mental health counselors conducted over the span of several months. These interviews were conducted and recorded over Zoom. The interviews were conducted with individuals who traveled in similar social circles as me. These previously existing relationships allowed the conversation to go deeper than before and allowed new levels of relationship. Emerging from these conversations were six overlapping themes: the importance of family, the need for health over career, the challenge of isolation, struggles with virtual education, assessing mental health, and facing the reality of a bright future not promised. Their revelations of deep academic challenges and fears about the future amid stories of devastating personal loss, produces a striking and complex picture of emerging strength.

Recommended Citation

Newbold, Hannah, "An Analysis Of The Effects Of COVID-19 On Students At The University of Mississippi: Family, Careers, Mental Health" (2021). Honors Theses . 1912. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/1912

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