Exploring the Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown on Social Roles and Emotions while Working from Home
This study provides specific insights into work-from-home impacts on researchers during the pandemic, but is incremental with a very small sample size.
This research investigated how COVID-19 lockdowns affected five researchers' work-life balance and emotions while working from home, finding they worked more with imbalanced roles and showed less varied emotional valence over time, indicating resilient adaptation.
In the opening months of 2020, COVID-19 changed the way for which people work, forcing more people to work from home. This research investigates the impact of COVID-19 on five researchers' work and private roles, happiness, and mobile and desktop activity patterns. Desktop and smartphone application usage were gathered before and during COVID-19. Individuals' roles and happiness were captured through experience sampling. Our analysis show that researchers tend to work more during COVID-19 resulting an imbalance of work and private roles. We also found that as working styles and patterns as well as individual behaviour changed, reported valence distribution was less varied in the later weeks of the pandemic when compared to the start. This shows a resilient adaptation to the disruption caused by the pandemic.