The COVID-19 pandemic, transmission mitigation strategies, and policies implemented across the United States led to major disruptions in day-to-day life, producing immediate effects on individuals, families, and communities. It was hypothesized that the pandemic would have broadly negative health and economic consequences, but that mitigation strategies and policies would affect participants differently in the short, medium, and long term based on work, family, social, and health circumstances. These effects could only be thoroughly examined with longitudinal analyses of data prior to and throughout the pandemic. This was a “shovel ready” project that leveraged existing longitudinal data collected in the Fragile Families and Childhood Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), the longest-running population-based U.S. birth cohort, collected before and throughout the pandemic, linked with multilevel COVID-19-related health, social, and economic measures, and prospective COVID-19 impact assessments to examine these issues.

FFCWS followed a representative sample of 4,898 children born in 1998-2000 in large U.S. cities and their parents over 7 waves (3,580 families participated in the last wave), providing a deep history of social support, economic factors, and health at the individual, family, neighborhood, city, and state levels. Due to the unique sampling strategy and COVID-19 transmission patterns, over 87% of FFCWS families were considered underserved or COVID-19 vulnerable. Focal children were entering early adulthood, a period when major adversity could derail that transition, and parents were entering middle age, where the impacts of COVID-19 on health and financial resources were likely to have particularly large consequences. Additionally, 1,400 respondents (700 parent-adult child pairs) were reinterviewed over two additional waves on health, economic, and behavioral aspects related to COVID-19.

In collaboration with the COVID consortium, the aims were to: 

1. Compare essential workers (50% of FFCWS parents and 36% of young adults), non-essential workers, and individuals who lost their jobs (over 20%) during the pandemic on short-term health, economic, social, and behavioral outcomes.
2. Tnvestigate immediate and downstream effects of COVID mitigation efforts on interpersonal, intergenerational, and family relationships and health resources.
3. Analyze immediate and downstream effects of COVID transmission, mitigation efforts, and COVID-related policies on health using contextual data (i.e., national, state, and local policy implementation and behavior) linked to measures of individual health in young adults and their parents collected before, and multiple times throughout the pandemic.

The study also examined how these macro-level effects on individuals differed by other contextual measures such as indicators of structural racism. The project aimed to:

• Share macro-level data on COVID-19 burden and mitigation strategies that could be linked to other studies
• Share FFCWS COVID-19 impact survey data
• Produce scholarly products on the short-term (2020-21), mid-term (2022-23), and long-term (2024-26) effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in a vulnerable population representative of children born in large U.S. cities and their parents.