Introduction
anxiety, infections, infectious disease, post-traumatic, infection, depression, post-traumatic stress
INFECTIOUS DISEASE, INFECTIONS, INFECTION
COVID-19 was identified as an infectious disease by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 February 2020.When examining the psychosocial impacts in a pandemic context, researchers experience key challenges not only with the choice of study design and measures but also in providing a multicultural perspective.To date, the majority of the literature examining the psychosocial impacts of COVID-19 is from studies conducted in China, Europe and the USA and a few multinational studies have been carried out among the general population. A multinational study that examined the psychosocial impacts of COVID-19 across several high-income countries (HICs) found generalised anxiety among 21.0% and major depression among 25.5% of their respondents.To address the issues identified above, we developed the 50-item COVID Psychosocial Impacts Scale (CPIS) to comprehensively assess the impacts of the pandemic including the adverse personal, social and economic consequences that followed. The construction of the scale was informed by our team’s experience assessing the psychosocial impacts of the Canterbury EarthquakesThe 50-item CPIS has been validated in a non-representative New Zealand sample at two-time points (2020, 2022) when the population exposure to COVID-19 community infections varied markedly.In addition to developing the CPIS, the research team took the opportunity to use resources that had already been deployed for the translation of the research instruments for the March 15th ProjectOur planned programme of work is to examine the 32-item CPIS and translated psychometric measures in the countries of interest. This protocol describes a cross-sectional observational study to assess the psychosocial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in seven LMICs (Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, Pakistan, Somalia and Turkey). It uses an online survey that includes the 32-item CPIS and standardised measures of psychological distress, post-traumatic stress, well-being and post-traumatic growth. Our findings will increase our understanding of the psychosocial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic across several LMICs with differing rates of infection, morbidity and mortality. Findings will also provide psychometric evidence on the novel CPIS. As a result, our research will contribute to a growing body of mental health measures that can be used for cross-cultural comparison.