COVID-19 is a threat to the health and safety of us all, but as the congressional debate of the federal stimulus package revealed, it may also present an opportunity to rethink how to best protect workers, the economy, and indeed all the members of our society.

“Rather than sending out thousands of online or paper questionnaires, we teamed up with health data science company ZOE to develop a simple symptom-monitoring app called COVIDradar. The app was made from scratch in about four days and would normally take four months. Volunteer citizen scientists use it to report their health status daily and note the appearance of any new symptoms. Once we realized that there was nothing similar available in the UK to monitor symptoms on a population-wide level, we decided to make the app freely available to all.”

Staying socially connected in times of threat has benefits beyond helping us manage our mental well-being. Other people can provide us with practical support, like picking up groceries or passing on relevant information, as well as emotional support. This feeling is called social solidarity, and if we get it right we’ll be much better equipped to respond to this and other crises.

Michael Quinn Patton, a giant in the field of evaluation, has been getting queries from colleagues young and old, novice evaluators and long-time practitioners, asking how he’s making sense of the global health emergency and what I think the implications may be for evaluation. Her’s his take on where we are and what it means.

Having already released a curated collection of existing conbtent relating to the nexus of pandemics and transportation, the National Academies’ Transportation Research Board is looking for other sources of useful information outside of academic journals.

If the promises of behavioral science can be believed, the UK government’s use of it would potentially minimize economic disruption while still tackling the crisis. This is because, in theory, behavioral science can achieve desirable behaviors without significantly impacting other day-to-day activities. However, the question is whether in practice behavioral science is helping to mitigate disaster.

Counties with large universities depend heavily on student responses to the decennial census, because the census counts determine the levels of federal funding communities receive. And if those students are counted as being there …?

Research explains the relatively late behavioral reaction to the information of COVID-19 in Europe, writes Joan Costa-Font

William Nordhaus, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who was the first macroeconomist to seriously consider how climate can be influenced by human behavior and that human action and economic policy can influence climate, will receive the 2020 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize.

In this moment of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the ideas of emergent design and researcher and design responsiveness take on new meaning and import; they can serve, methods expert Sharon Ravitch argues, to connect more traditional qualitative methods with participatory frameworks and critical and humanizing methodologies.

Social science, argues Michael Taster of the LSE Impact blog, has an important role to play, by directly contributing to policy surrounding COVID-19 and its impacts, but also by acting as a critical friend, which raises the urgent question: how can this wealth of knowledge and expertise best be communicated?

Psychological scientists at the University of Washington’s Center for the Science of Social Connection draw from their clinical and research experiences help us understand the side effects of social distancing and suggest strategies for addressing them.