ABSTRACT
PURPOSE: Mental health inequalities across social identities/positions during the COVID-19 pandemic have been mostly reported independently from each other or in a limited way (e.g., at the intersection between age and sex or gender). We aim to provide an inclusive socio-demographic mapping of different mental health measures in the population using quantitative methods that are consistent with an intersectional perspective. METHODS: Data included 8,588 participants from two British cohorts (born in 1990 and 2000-2002, respectively), collected in February/March 2021 (during the third UK nationwide lockdown). Measures of anxiety and depressive symptomatology, loneliness, and life satisfaction were analysed using Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA) models. RESULTS: We found evidence of large mental health inequalities across intersectional strata. Large proportions of those inequalities were accounted for by the additive effects of the variables used to define the intersections, with some of the largest gaps associated with sexual orientation (with sexual minority groups showing substantially worse outcomes). Additional inequalities were found by cohort/generation, birth sex, racial/ethnic groups, and socioeconomic position. Intersectional effects were observed mostly in intersections defined by combinations of privileged and marginalised social identities/positions (e.g., lower-than-expected life satisfaction in South Asian men in their thirties from a sexual minority and a disadvantaged childhood social class). CONCLUSION: We found substantial inequalities largely cutting across intersectional strata defined by multiple co-constituting social identities/positions. The large gaps found by sexual orientation extend the existing evidence that sexual minority groups were disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Study implications and limitations are discussed.
ABSTRACT
In order to explore the choice behavior of residents' travel mode in the post-COVID-19 era, a choice behavior experiment was conducted. A mixed Logit model and a latent class conditional Logit model of travel mode choice were constructed based on the data obtained from questionnaire surveys. Stata software was used to calibrate the model parameters, and the main factors influencing residents' travel mode choices were obtained. The results show that both models reflect the heterogeneity of individual travel mode choices. Compared with the mixed Logit model, the latent class conditional Logit model has an improvement of 13% in the goodness of fit and an increase of 3.03% in the prediction accuracy, which provides an effective tool for analyzing individual heterogeneity of travel behavior under public health emergencies. The latent class conditional Logit model divides residents into four and five groups according to the two scenarios of low and medium risk areas. From the perspective of travel mode attributes, the waiting time and the traveling time have become the most important influencing factors for residents to choose the travel modes. From the perspective of personal socio-economic attributes, women with higher incomes are more inclined to choose private cars to travel. The older are more sensitive to travel costs, and men are more willing to choose bus and subway travel. Copyright © 2022 by Science Press.
ABSTRACT
The wide dissemination of false information and the frequent occurrence of extreme speeches on online social platforms have become increasingly prominent, which impact on the harmony and stability of society. In order to solve the problems in the dissemination and polarization of public opinion over online social platforms, it is necessary to conduct in-depth research on the formation mechanism of the dissemination and polarization of public opinion. This article appends individual communicating willingness and forgetting effects to the Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIR) model to describe individual state transitions; secondly, it introduces three heterogeneous factors describing the characteristics of individual differences in the Jager-Amblard (J-A) model, namely: Individual conformity, individual conservative degree, and inter-individual relationship strength in order to reflect the different roles of individual heterogeneity in the opinions interaction; thirdly, it integrates the improved SEIR model and J-A model to construct the SEIR-JA model to study the formation mechanism of public opinion dissemination and polarization. Transmission parameters and polarization parameters are simulated and analyzed. Finally, a public opinion event from the pricing of China's self-developed COVID-19 vaccine are used, and related Weibo comment data about this event are also collected so as to verify the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed model.