Living in Boston during COVID-19: Lifestyle, Ideology, and Context Drive Attitudes

In the Summer of 2020, the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) at Northeastern University, the Center for Survey Research (CSR) at University of Massachusetts Boston, and the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) conducted a survey that captures the experiences of 1626 Bostonians during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey provides unique insights into how experiences and challenges varied across the populations and neighborhoods of a single city—something not currently available from any other source, in Boston or otherwise. In second report in this series, we identified a variety of differences across ethnicities and neighborhood in attitudes toward infection risk and social distancing guidelines, habits of mask-wearing, and understanding of asymptomatic spread of COVID19. In this fourth report, we focus on related factors that might be driving these differences, including sex, age, being at high risk for infection, income, education, household composition (e.g., marital status, number of children), and political ideology. Doing so revealed multiple new lessons about how we might understand and support differences across communities.