IDB/Cornell Coronavirus Survey: Methodological Notes
Date issued
Jun 2020
Data
The IDB/Cornell Coronavirus Survey collects information on labor market impacts, food security, social distancing, and knowledge regarding the Covid-19 pandemic through an online survey. The primary modules of the questionnaire were standardized across countries to allow data pooling and cross-country comparisons. The survey was launched in the first country on March 27, 2020, and the majority of responses were collected during April 2020. Respondents were recruited through social media using paid social-media advertisement campaigns. The dataset is entirely composed of responses to an online survey, and therefore it is unable to capture information regarding the most-vulnerable people, who may not have access to internet or social media. However, the survey was still able to collect information from different socioeconomic backgrounds and subnational regions. Thus, the data are useful for analyzing patterns across different socioeconomic groups and for making cross-country comparisons. The dataset includes weights to increase the within-country representativeness of the data, as well as weights that correct for differences in the response rate across countries and provide a larger weight to observations from countries with larger populations.