COVID-19 and the Transformation of Canadian Public Opinion: A Panel Study

• Principal investigator: Allison Harell (Department of Poticial Science, UQAM)

• Research Team: Laura French Bourgeois (Postdoc, UQAM), Victoria Esses (Professor, University of Western Ontario), Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant (Associate Professor, Queen’s University), Peter Loewen (Professor, University of Toronto), Daniel Rubenson (Professor, Ryerson University), Laura Stephenson (Professor, Western University)

• Grant: CSDC COVID-19 special grant

• Project description: With the declaration of the COVID-­‐19 pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, the content of our fourth wave shifted to understanding how prior values and attitudes shaped citizens’ reactions to the coronavirus pandemic.In addition to tracking important values across waves, the fourth wave also included a new set of questions about people’s satisfaction with federal and provincial governments’ handling of the crisis (see Harell et al. 2020, Policy Options) and their perceptions about collective norms around social distancing. We are seeking additional funding from the CSDC to recontact our fourth wave panelists for a fifth survey in early June 2020.Our existing dataset provides a wealth of repeated measures about individuals attitudes toward social groups in Canada, political values, attitudes toward key political actors, social networks, news consumption, and a host of psychological predispositions. Given a relatively strong response rate, we would like to collect a fifth (unplanned) wave to further explore three primary sets of questions. Unlike many surveys going into the field, we have the advantage of having an existing panel in place that can be leveraged.