CoCo Study – Coping with Corona

You want to use the CoCo Data?

We are happy to provide our data to researchers for their own projects and collaborations.
In our publication “ A global experience-sampling method study of well-being during times of crisis: The CoCo project.“ (https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12813) we inform about the collected variables and how interested researchers can request access to data.

Apart from this, interested researchers can get further information on the collected data and find the data request form at the osf repository of the CoCo project (https://osf.io/2tzp9/).

Project Goals & Team

“How do different people cope with the changes and restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic?”

“Why do people differ in their well-being during the pandemic and the subsequent return to normality?”

We are tackling these questions in our joint research project “Coping with Corona” (CoCo), which is financed by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).
We are a joint research team from the University of Muenster, the University of Osnabrueck, the LMU Munich, and multiple international project partners.

For us, understanding the individual mechanisms operating in our daily lives is key to coping with future crises and a successful return to normality. To develop this understanding, we collaborate internationally with over 50 renowned project partners from different disciplines (e.g., USA, Australia, Israel, Argentina, Brazil, Sweden, Germany. ➤Interactive Map) and apply the most cutting-edge methods of data collection (e.g., smartphone sensing, experience sampling) to achieve reliable insights that are as close as possible to our everyday lives.

International Experience-Sampling-Study

In this Experience-Sampling (ESM)-study (Experience Sampling = collecting participants’ experiences from their daily lives), we monitor the participants for a time period of four weeks to learn more about their individual experiences and behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as their individual ways of coping with restrictions and the ease of restrictions.
With the help of our numerous international project partners, we enable people from multiple countries (e.g., Brasil, USA, Israel, Sweden, Germany… ➤Interactive Map) to participate. This allows us to achieve results that are as comprehensive and generalizable as possible.

The International ESM -Study includes:

Online pre- and post-survey (comprising several scientifically recognized questionnaires)
Four-week experience-sampling phase
(Therein, participants will complete a short (2- to 3-minute) online questionnaire up to five times a day over the course of four weeks. The participants will be asked to complete the questionnaires via email. They will be invited to complete an evening-questionnaire at the same time every day, and four additional ESM-questionnaires distributed throughout the day. This method ensures a more temporally accurate and comprehensive assessment of the participants’ experiences and behaviors than other methods (e.g., studies with single questionnaires)

To get more information on questionnaire content click here.

Our Worldwide Collaborators

Interested to join our collaboration of researchers worldwide?
Directly contact the contact persons or click here.

Ethical approval

The project was completely approved with applications to the Ethics Council of Osnabrück University, the Ethics Committee for Psychology and Sports Science at the University of Münster, and the Ethics Committee for Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of Munich.
The ethical approvals are available here:
WWU Muenster: click here
University Osnabrueck: click here
LMU Munich: click here
(If necessary, these letters of approval can easily be translated in your respective language by using the function for translation of documents by Google Translate.)

The three PIs are jointly responsible for the entire project. The whole content, including the surveys, is hosted at the respective universities and international partners have no access. They are not responsible for its‘ content or its‘ ethical implications. International partners can contact their respective ethics committee upon request and should subsequently contact us.
Additionally, we have created a template in English language which you can use if you decide to apply for ethical approval at your university. This template can be downloaded via the link in the respective FAQ section.

Guidelines for Co-Authorship and Joint Publications

All collaborators will be involved in key publications regarding the CoCo project and general findings on the influence of personality on well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide.
Additionally, collaborators will have the possibility to join us in the investigation of more specific research questions (e.g., the influence of social interaction processes; research questions focusing on one continent) and respective publications. For this purpose, we will set up a data request form that interested researchers can fill out to get access to relevant variables, countries, or languages.
Please note that we won’t be able to freely share the whole data set for data security purposes. We kindly welcome all collaboration requests and strive to enable as much research as possible with our data.

Data Security

The data is collected anonymously. Pseudonyms are used to enable participants to request the deletion of their information during data collection. After the data collection has ended, all pseudonyms will be deleted. The data collected is stored on encrypted servers of the survey hosting German university. Our data collection takes place following the strict requirements of the German DSGVO (General Data Protection Regulation – Datenschutzgrundverordnung). Data protection officers from all three German universities approved all procedures of this project. We follow the data protection and ethical guidelines of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Society for Psychology (DGPs) for quality assurance in research.

Interested to join our collaboration of researchers worldwide?

Directly get in touch with the contact persons (see below) or click here.

University of Muenster
(WWU Muenster)
Work group of Psychological Assessment and Personality Psychology
Fliednerstraße 21
48149 Muenster
Project Lead: Prof. Dr. Mitja Back
Contact Person: Julian Scharbert
julian.scharbert@wwu.de

University of Osnabrueck (UOS)
Institute of Psychology
Developmental Psychology
Seminarstraße 20
49074 Osnabrueck
Project Lead: Prof. Dr. Maarten van Zalk
Contact Person: Julian ter Horst
jterhorst@uos.de

Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
(LMU Munich)
Department of Psychology
Chair: Psychological Methods & Assessment
Leopoldstraße 13
80802 Munich
Project Lead: Prof. Dr. Markus Bühner
Contact Person: Thomas Reiter
T.Reiter@psy.lmu.de


Prof. Dr. Mitja Back Principal Investigator WWU Muenster	Prof. Dr. Maarten van Zalk Principal Investigator University of Osnabrueck	Prof. Dr. Markus Bühner Principal Investigator LMU Munich	Prof. Dr. Samuel Gosling Project Partner University of Texas at Austin	Prof. Dr. Gabriella Harari Project Partner Stanford University	Prof. Dr. Sandra Matz Project Partner Columbia University	Prof. Dr. Clemens Stachl Project Partner St. Gallen University