| Erfurt Laboratory for Empirical Research, Faculty of Philosophy, Education, School, and Behaviour, Knowledge, Spaces, and Media, Research

Corona Snapshot Monitoring "COSMO" extended by interactive element

The website of the much-cited Corona Snapshot Monitoring (COSMO) has been extended by an interactive element: the so-called COSMO Explorer.

Eine Frau trägt eine Maske, vor ihr Viren in der Luft

This means that the perceptions, attitudes and behaviour patterns of the German population regularly surveyed over the course of the pandemic can now be investigated. Several variables can be presented in parallel or individual aspects can be grouped according to specific criteria such as age, gender or place of residence. By inserting confidence intervals, it is also possible to estimate significant differences between the groups and to evaluate changes against the background of the case number statistics and significant events in the course of the pandemic. "The COSMO Explorer will be continuously further developed in the coming weeks", announces Prof. Dr. Cornelia Betsch, who heads the COSMO project at the University of Erfurt. Among other things, it is planned to display correlative relationships so that relationships between variables can be better recognised. "With the COSMO Explorer we want to give interested parties from politics and administration, science and the media the opportunity to use the data collected in the monitoring process even more intensively in their own work".

Further Information / Contact:
Prof. Dr. Cornelia Betsch
E-Mail: cornelia.betsch@uni-erfurt.de

Background COSMO

Under the direction of Prof. Dr. Cornelia Betsch, Heisenberg Professor for Health Communication at the University of Erfurt, the Robert Koch Institute is operating the "COVID-19 Snapshot Monitoring" (COSMO) together with other cooperation partners. Once a week, the consortium conducts a live online survey to determine how people subjectively perceive the risks of the COVID-19 virus, which countermeasures are known, and which of these are already being used or rejected. The aim of this project is to gain a repeated insight into the "psychological situation" of the population. This should make it easier to orient communication measures and reporting in such a way as to offer the population correct, helpful knowledge and prevent misinformation and actionism.

For each round of the survey, 1,000 people are interviewed with an online questionnaire. The samples are drawn in such a way that they correspond to the distribution of age, gender and federal state in the German population.

The consortium is a joint project of the University of Erfurt, the Robert Koch Institute, the Leibniz Centre for Psychological Information and Documentation, the Science Media Center, the Bernhard-Nocht-Institute for Tropical Medicine and the Yale Institute for Global Health. The project is financed by the University of Erfurt, the Leibniz Centre and the Robert Koch Institute and additionally by the Klaus Tschira Foundation.

The results of the weekly surveys can be found here:

Project page COSMO

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