8th December 2021: Data collection will continue to the end of March 2022 at least, still fortnightly with Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain and United Kingdom.
8th December 2021: Please note: due to the way consent for personal data on health questions is managed there were periods in which many records do not have a response for the PHQ4 questions. These appear as N/A (Not asked). This relates specifically to Australia (from 19/02/21 to 18/10/21), Canada (11/02/21 to 15/10/21) and the USA (23/2/21 to 13/10/21).
31st August 2021: We have replaced Norway with the Netherlands from this point. 3rd March 2021: We have replaced Netherlands with the USA from this point onwards. 4th February 2021: Data from Israel was added from this wave and going forward. It is nationally representative of Israeli citizens only. Israel replaces Finland.
This is the data repository for the Imperial College London YouGov Covid 19 Behaviour Tracker Data Hub.
YouGov has partnered with the Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) at Imperial College London to gather global insights on people’s behaviours in response to COVID-19.
It is designed to provide behavioural analysis on how different populations are responding to the pandemic, helping public health bodies in their efforts to limit the impact of the disease. Anonymised respondent level data will be available for all public health and academic institutions globally.
The questions in the survey, led by IGHI, cover data on testing, symptoms, self-isolating in response to symptoms and the ability and willingness to self-isolate if needed. It also looks at behaviours, including going outdoors, working outside the home, contact with others, hand washing and the extent of compliance with 20 common preventative measures.
IGHI has built a publicly available dashboard to visualise the data.
The datafiles contain responses from nationally representative surveys of the general public about symptoms, testing, self-isolation, social distancing and behaviour.
Contextual data includes: gender, age, region (within country), number of people in the household, children in household, health conditions, working status and the date of the survey response. A weighting variable is also provided, typically based on age, gender and region. For obvious reasons, people with severe symptoms, people who are / have been hospitalised and some other hard to reach groups will be under-represented in the sample.
We have completed a privacy assessment and have taken steps to safeguard the anonymity of the respondents by ensuring that the survey responses and contextual data, when looked at in isolation or as a combined data set, cannot be used to re-identify the respondents. A key part of this has been the exclusion of all data may lead to a greater risk of identification. For example, in the data set ‘age’ is represented by a numeric value rather than a full date of birth, and ‘regions’ are represented areas large enough to protect privacy, but which are still statistically valuable, such as Scotland or West Midlands.
The files contain anonymised respondent level data files from surveys conducted from the 31st March 2020 to date across : Australia; Brazil; Canada; China; Denmark; Finland; France; Germany; Hong Kong; India; Indonesia; Italy; Japan; Malaysia; Mexico; Netherlands; Norway; Philippines; Saudi Arabia; Singapore; South Korea; Spain; Sweden; Taiwan; Thailand; UAE; UK; USA; Vietnam.
- codebook of the core questionnaire (
codebook.pdf) - list of countries with data (
countries.csv) - individual country files with respondent-level data (
data/country-name.csv)
- Researchers, policy makers and other scientific collaborators can contact the research and policy team at Imperial College using this link.
- Additional COVID-19 behavioural data for health organisations, media and companies is also accessible upon request on this link.
ICL-YouGov Global Survey development of measures is led by Sarah P. Jones of Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation (ORCID). Survey questions have been contributed and adapted from collaborative sources, please see coviddatahub.com for a list of contributors..
- World Economic Forum
- The World Bank
- Oxford Supertracker
- Oxford Policy tracker
- ECDC
- CDC testing in US
- Johns Hopkins Data Repository on GitHub
- WHO COVID-19 Dashboard
This data repository is copyright 2020 YouGov Plc, all rights reserved, is provided to the public strictly for educational and academic research purposes.
Jones, Sarah P., Imperial College London Big Data Analytical Unit and YouGov Plc. 2020, Imperial College London YouGov Covid Data Hub, v1.0, YouGov Plc, April 2020