Q&A with Kelly Wierenga on social-distancing research

Kelly Wierenga, an assistant professor of nursing at IUPUI, is interested in what people are thinking, feeling and doing—or not doing—right now.

Wierenga, who turns 40 this week, is co-leading a study on health behaviors and health outcomes during the pandemic. She and co-researcher Scott Moore at Case Western Reserve University are surveying people on a wide range of topics ranging from their social-distancing behaviors and health status, physical activity, job status and thoughts and feelings about COVID-19, among other things.

She joined IUPUI in 2018 after completing postdoctoral work at Case Western University, and she is a 2018-2020 Jonas Scholar, a program that supports doctoral nursing scholars as they pursue leadership roles.

What do you hope to learn from this study?

It was geared to kind of help us identify which areas are of concern to people in the U.S. We are hoping from the whole project to increase the knowledge about health behaviors and health outcomes of Americans, both before and after the physical-distancing mandate. We anticipate that there’s some physical health concerns that are going to be there, but there’s also some social and emotional health issues.

What is the value of researching a unique situation like this?

There’s going to be a shift in what “normal” is. … For example, there are a lot of people [for whom] exercise is a challenge …. and when all gyms closed and people were encouraged to not leave their homes, that makes it extremely difficult to stay physically active. There’s changes like this that are occurring that may never go back to how we saw them previously. By understanding what’s going on right now, not only does this inform health science and health behavior science in the future, but also there will also likely be other illnesses. There’s acute illnesses all over the world.

You’re trying to get 5,000 people to take this survey. How are you soliciting them?

We’ve been using social media and personal networks to gather those participants. Everyone involved with this study and anyone they’re involved with is welcome to share links that we have on Facebook or on Twitter, and I believe it’s also on Instagram (and Reddit).

Right now, it’s been mostly just networking. We are currently exploring Facebook targeted marketing. The challenge right now is that we don’t have any funding for this research, so we are very limited on what we can do.

How long do you think it will take to reach 5,000?

We may stop recruiting before 5,000. This is such an iterative process, researching something that’s going on right now, that changes so rapidly. And so I would anticipate that we’ll probably continue to encourage and seek out people through May, and maybe the early part of June.

After you have enough responses, what happens next?

We’ll look at what components are important to encourage physical distancing. What kind of predictors are there of people who are going to be socially distant, and what factors are going to undermine that? That (analysis) won’t be on the full sample; that will be on some early responders.

We’re writing grants right now to broaden what we’re doing with this, to look at the long-term implications of the distancing.•