The interaction between social factors and adversities on self-harm during the COVID-19 pandemic: longitudinal analysis of 49 227 UK adults
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Abstract
Little is known about which factors exacerbate and buffer the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-related adversities on changes in thinking about and engaging in self-harm over time.
Aims
To examine how changes in four social factors contribute to changes in self-harm thoughts and behaviours over time and how these factors in turn interact with adversities and worries about adversities to increase risk for these outcomes.
Method
Data from 49 227 UK adults in the UCL COVID-19 Social Study were analysed across the first 59 weeks of the pandemic. Fixed-effects logistic regressions examined time-varying associations between social support quality, loneliness, number of days of face-to-face contact for >15 min and number of days phoning/video calling for ≥15 min with self-harm thoughts and behaviours. We then examined how these four factors in turn interacted with the total number of adversities and worries about adversity and how this affected outcomes.
Results
Increases in the quality of social support were associated with decreases in the likelihood of both outcomes, whereas greater loneliness was associated with an increase in their likelihood. Associations were less clear for telephone/video contact and face-to-face contact with outcomes. Social support buffered and loneliness exacerbated the impact of adversity experiences on self-harm behaviours.
Conclusions
These findings suggest the importance of the quality of one's social support network, rather than the mere presence of contact, for reducing the likelihood of self-harm behaviours in the context of COVID-19 pandemic-related adversity and worry.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.19.21259173: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.
Consent: The study was approved by the UCL Research Ethics Committee [12467/005] and all participants gave informed consent.Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization Sampling is not random and therefore is not representative of the UK population, but the study does contain a heterogeneous sample. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.19.21259173: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.
Consent: The study was approved by the UCL Research Ethics Committee [12467/005] and all participants gave informed consent.Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization Sampling is not random and therefore is not representative of the UK population, but the study does contain a heterogeneous sample. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This study has a number of strengths as well as limitations. Strengths of this study include a long follow-up period with repeated measurements of predictor and outcome variables and the use of a large, well-stratified sample on demographic groups. Though data were weighted on the basis of population estimates of core demographics, sampling was not random and the findings can therefore not be generalised to the UK population as a whole. However, our goal was to identify associations between predictors and outcomes, and not to present population prevalence estimates. We also used a statistical modelling approach which accounted for time-invariant risk factors for self-harm such as genetic predisposition and adversity early in life6,7 and is thus an improvement upon prior research which did not account for these factors. This study also has several limitations. First, there were some differences in the wording of our measures of adversities and worries about adversities (see Table S3), and although selected to be congruent with one another, they may not therefore have captured the exact same adversity and worry. Second, our measures of face-to-face/telephone/video contact lacked detail on who the participant was speaking with, and prior work from our research group suggests significant variability in the types of contacts accessed by people who report self-harm thoughts and behaviours.12 Third, our measure of self-harm behaviours did not specify what self-harming was, and parti...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No funding statement was detected.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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