Adjusting to the New Normal of COVID-19 Survey

1. Abstract

The Adjusting to the New Normal of COVID-19 Survey is a psychometric instrument developed to evaluate how individuals adapt their everyday routines, occupational responsibilities, social interactions, and personal lives in response to the widespread disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Emerging from research conducted in West Africa (specifically Ghana), the instrument operationalizes the concept of the “new normal”—defined as the sustained recalibration of personal, domestic, and public behaviors necessitated by ongoing epidemiological risks and corresponding institutional mandates. Originally formulated as an initial pool of 25 items within a broader epidemiological and behavioral assessment battery, psychometric refinement utilizing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and parallel analysis established a final 23-item, two-component measurement structure accounting for 54.70% of the total variance. These two distinct dimensions comprise Outdoor Activities (reflecting shifts in public engagement, mobility, social gatherings, and occupational/commercial dynamics) and Personal Development/Family-Oriented Activities (capturing lifestyle modifications within the private sphere, including home-based learning, family interactions, and subjective well-being management). Items are evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“hardly any change”) to 5 (“changed very much”). The scale demonstrates high internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .88 for Outdoor Activities and .91 for Personal Development/Family-Oriented Activities. By providing a culturally situated yet theoretically extensible framework, this survey provides researchers, public health officials, and behavioral scientists with a validated tool to measure behavioral adaptability, epidemiological compliance, and psychosocial transitions in post-crisis or endemic societal conditions.

2. Keywords

Adjusting to the New Normal of COVID-19 Survey, Behavioral Adjustment, COVID-19 Pandemic, Health Behavior, New Normal, Outdoor Activities, Personal Development, Psychometrics, Public Health Compliance, Sub-Saharan Africa.

3. Authors

The scale was developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers specializing in social psychology, behavioral medicine, and cross-cultural psychometrics:

• Elias Kodjo Kekesi — Department of Psychology, University of Ghana, Legon-Accra, Ghana. ORCID: 0000-0002-5301-249X. Email: [email protected].
• Collins Badu Agyemang — Department of Psychology, University of Ghana, Legon-Accra, Ghana.
• David Lackland Sam — Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway.

4. Purpose

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic destabilized foundational structures of global society, triggering abrupt interruptions in commerce, religious practices, educational instruction, and social kinship networks. While early behavioral science research focused primarily on immediate affective reactions (such as acute anxiety, panic buying, or depressive symptom onset) and direct epidemiological non-compliance, there was an emerging recognition that individuals faced a long-term reconfiguration of their daily existences. This systemic transformation became known colloquially and academically as the “new normal.” The primary purpose of the Adjusting to the New Normal of COVID-19 Survey is to systematically capture and quantify the degree to which adult populations adapt their behavioral patterns to this transformed environment.

Developed and validated primarily within an adult Ghanaian population, the scale fills a critical empirical void. Much of the early psychometric literature documenting behavioral modifications during the pandemic originated from high-income nations in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. Developing contexts in Sub-Saharan Africa faced unique systemic challenges, including large informal economies, multi-generational households, communal social frameworks, and limited public healthcare infrastructures. The instrument was conceptualized to delineate how individuals navigate the competing demands of health-protective measures (such as physical distancing and restrictions on gatherings) alongside the necessity of maintaining familial cohesion and economic survival.

From an applied perspective, the survey serves multiple critical functions across clinical, community, and policy research environments:

• Epidemiological and Public Health Policy Evaluation: It enables policymakers to assess whether state-level interventions (e.g., mask mandates, restrictions on indoor dining, religious service limitations) translate into perceived behavioral shifts, identifying segments of the population that experience inertia or resistance to behavioral adaptation.
• Psychosocial and Mental Health Research: Prolonged adaptation to public crises often induces cognitive fatigue, stress, and depressive symptomology. Quantifying the magnitude of routine restructuring allows researchers to investigate the psychological costs of behavioral adaptation and identify protective resilience factors.
• Cross-Cultural Comparative Behavioral Science: The instrument facilitates direct investigations into how collectivist social structures, characteristic of many African societies, alter public versus private behavioral adaptations compared to more individualistic cultures.

5. Psychological Construct

The core psychological construct quantified by this instrument is behavioral adjustment to environmental disruption, operationalized within the framework of pandemic-induced lifestyle transformation. In psychological taxonomy, adjustment refers to the psychological, cognitive, and behavioral processes through which an individual manages demands, conflicts, and environmental modifications to maintain psychological equilibrium and functional efficacy. In the context of a prolonged biological crisis, adjustment deviates from temporary compliance; it entails a stable restructuring of daily life routines across distinct ecological spheres.

The scale models this adaptation across two foundational, psychometrically derived dimensions:

1. Outdoor Activities (Public and Interpersonal Behavioral Reorganization)

The Outdoor Activities subscale (14 items in the final factorial structure) measures behavioral changes related to engaging with the external world beyond the private domestic sphere. This dimension encompasses activities that carry higher baseline risks of viral transmission and are subject to regulatory restrictions. Key behavioral domains measured under this construct include:

• Commercial and Marketplace Interactions: Alterations in how individuals purchase food, manage daily errands, visit local retail centers, and interact with open-air or enclosed commercial venues.
• Religious and Communal Gatherings: Modifications in attendance and participation in institutionalized worship services, funerals, weddings, and traditional communal ceremonies—events of profound social and spiritual importance in West African sociocultural contexts.
• Occupational and Commuting Modalities: Shifts in transportation choices (e.g., changes in utilizing crowded public transit networks such as tro-tros or shared taxis) and workplace arrangements, including physical distancing within work environments.
• Recreational and Peer Socializing: Reductions or strategic alterations in leisure activities, sports attendance, casual peer gatherings, and neighborhood socializing.

2. Personal Development and Family-Oriented Activities (Domestic and Self-Regulatory Reorganization)

The Personal Development/Family-Oriented Activities subscale (9 items in the final factorial structure) captures behavioral adjustments occurring primarily within the private, home, and internal developmental spheres. While external restrictions forced contractions in public engagement, they simultaneously necessitated compensatory adaptations within households. This construct entails:

• Intra-Familial Relationship Dynamics: Changes in the quantity and quality of time invested in spousal relationships, child-rearing, elder care, and direct interpersonal communication among cohabiting family members.
• Self-Directed Learning and Personal Growth: Utilization of non-work hours for acquiring new competencies, participating in remote educational modules, pursuing individual hobbies, and engaging in constructive creative outlets.
• Intrapersonal Health Management and Wellness Routines: Deliberate reorganizations of sleep-wake schedules, domestic physical exercise, nutritional planning, and digital entertainment consumption to preserve psychological stability amidst chronic uncertainty.

6. Theoretical Framework

The scale is anchored in established models of behavioral adaptation, health decision-making, and social-ecological systems.

Social-Ecological Model (SEM)

Originally conceptualized by Urie Bronfenbrenner, the Social-Ecological Model posits that human behavior is shaped by interconnected environmental tiers: the microsystem (interpersonal family dynamics), the mesosystem (community, religious institutions, workplace), and the macrosystem (cultural values, public health mandates, epidemiological realities). The Adjusting to the New Normal of COVID-19 Survey operationalizes this multi-tiered architecture by measuring changes across both proximal private systems (Personal Development/Family-Oriented Activities) and distal communal environments (Outdoor Activities). The instrument assesses how structural systemic shifts at the macrosystem level necessitate reciprocal adaptations in the individual’s microsystemic daily routines.

Transactional Model of Stress and Coping

Formulated by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman, the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping provides the theoretical rationale for conceptualizing lifestyle changes as active coping strategies. Under this framework, the pandemic represents an ongoing environmental stressor evaluated through cognitive appraisal. The items within the scale capture problem-focused coping (modifying external exposure risks via outdoor behavioral changes) and emotion-focused or palliative coping (investing in family bonding and personal self-actualization within the domestic environment). Thus, higher ratings of change do not merely indicate passive compliance, but reflect proactive cognitive and behavioral adjustments designed to reduce vulnerability and maintain psychological well-being.

Health Belief Model (HBM) and Protection Motivation Theory (PMT)

The behavioral adjustments measured by the survey also draw upon the Health Belief Model and Protection Motivation Theory. These models assert that an individual’s engagement in protective health behaviors is governed by perceived susceptibility to illness, perceived severity of the consequences, perceived benefits of preventive action, and perceived barriers. In the Adjusting to the New Normal Survey, substantial changes in outdoor activities reflect behavioral adjustments driven by threat appraisal and response efficacy, while modifications in personal development reflect adaptive coping strategies that balance perceived barriers against lifestyle preservation.

7. Validity

Initial psychometric evaluation was conducted by Kekesi, Agyemang, and Sam (2023) using a sample of adult community respondents in Ghana. The empirical validation procedures focused predominantly on structural, content, and construct-related validity evidence:

Content and Face Validity

The initial 25-item pool was generated based on qualitative observations of pandemic-related behavioral shifts, expert consultations in health psychology, and reviews of state-mandated non-pharmaceutical interventions in Ghana. Items were iteratively evaluated to ensure that everyday behavioral patterns—ranging from market shopping and religious gatherings to family leisure and personal hobbies—were represented in culturally relevant language.

Structural and Construct Validity

Structural construct validity was examined through exploratory data reduction techniques. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) accompanied by empirical Parallel Analysis supported the theoretical proposition that behavioral adjustment during the pandemic is not a unidimensional construct, but is split across distinct social spheres. Parallel analysis demonstrated that only the first two components possessed empirical eigenvalues that exceeded those derived from 1,000 replicated simulations of random data matrices.

Two items (Item 5 and Item 7) demonstrated substantial cross-loadings across both components without meeting criterion thresholds for primary factor purity. The psychometric team removed these two items, refining the instrument to a 23-item two-factor solution that accounted for 54.70% of the total cumulative variance. The clear segregation of items loading onto Outdoor Activities versus Personal Development/Family-Oriented Activities demonstrates internal construct validity, indicating that respondents systematically distinguish between external risk-mitigation adjustments and internal domestic adaptations.

Criterion, Convergent, and Discriminant Validity

While the initial publication did not report formal multitrait-multimethod correlation matrices, convergent construct validity was supported by the survey’s integration within a larger investigation examining COVID-19 knowledge and compliance with non-pharmaceutical preventive behaviors. The behavioral adjustment dimensions demonstrated logical theoretical associations with reported compliance behaviors, showing that individuals with higher knowledge and higher compliance were more likely to report profound adjustments in outdoor activities. Ongoing research is recommended to establish formal convergent validity with standardized instruments such as the Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S) and discriminant validity against generalized trait neuroticism or situational depression.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the Adjusting to the New Normal of COVID-19 Survey has been empirically evaluated through internal consistency analyses, demonstrating high measurement precision across both underlying subscales:

• Outdoor Activities Subscale (14 items): Demonstrated a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of α = .88, indicating strong internal consistency reliability. This coefficient reflects a cohesive measurement domain, demonstrating that items assessing outdoor behavioral changes systematically capture shared variance without exhibiting problematic item redundancy.
• Personal Development/Family-Oriented Activities Subscale (9 items): Yielded a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of α = .91, reflecting high internal consistency. This finding indicates that items measuring familial interaction, private development, domestic routines, and internal coping share strong inter-item covariance within the target population.

The total scale’s internal consistency indices exceed the standard .80 threshold recommended for psychometric research and approximate the .90 benchmark desirable for individual-level behavioral monitoring. Future research across broader cohorts should supplement these internal consistency metrics with longitudinal test-retest reliability evaluations (to assess temporal stability) and McDonald’s omega (ω) calculations to account for potential variations in tau-equivalence.

9. Factor Analysis

The factorial architecture of the Adjusting to the New Normal of COVID-19 Survey was established through rigorous exploratory psychometric procedures conducted by the original authors (Kekesi et al., 2023):

Initial Principal Component Analysis (PCA)

An unconstrained Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was performed on the preliminary 25-item pool. This initial extraction revealed four components displaying eigenvalues greater than Kaiser’s criterion of 1.0:

• Component 1: Eigenvalue accounting for 46.40% of the total variance.
• Component 2: Eigenvalue accounting for 8.30% of the total variance.
• Component 3: Eigenvalue accounting for 5.27% of the total variance.
• Component 4: Eigenvalue accounting for 4.29% of the total variance.

Scree Test and Horn’s Parallel Analysis

Relying solely on Kaiser’s criterion (eigenvalues > 1) can result in factor over-extraction. Consequently, the authors inspected the Cattell scree plot, which revealed a distinct inflection point (“elbow”) occurring immediately after the second component, indicating that the third and fourth components primarily represented random sampling noise. To confirm this structure, Horn’s Parallel Analysis was conducted using 1,000 Monte Carlo replicated simulations of a randomly generated data matrix matching the empirical sample dimensions. The empirical eigenvalues for only the first two components exceeded the 95th percentile criterion values generated from the simulated datasets, confirming a robust two-factor structure.

Factor Rotation and Item Pruning

Because behavioral adjustments in public life and private family life are theoretically and empirically correlated rather than orthogonal, an oblique rotation technique (Oblimin rotation) was applied. The rotated pattern matrix demonstrated clear simple structure:

• Component 1 (Outdoor Activities) received primary loadings from 15 items.
• Component 2 (Personal Development/Family-Oriented Activities) received primary loadings from 10 items.

During the examination of the rotated pattern and structure matrices, two items—Item 5 and Item 7—demonstrated substantial cross-loadings across both components. Because these cross-loadings threatened the discriminant validity and conceptual clarity of the dimensions, both items were excised from the instrument. The re-analyzed final 23-item, two-component solution accounted for 54.70% of the total cumulative variance, yielding 14 items loading cleanly onto Outdoor Activities and 9 items loading onto Personal Development/Family-Oriented Activities.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The technical specifications and administration parameters of the instrument are summarized below:

• Test Type: Original self-report survey / psychological rating inventory.
• Format: Paper-and-pencil or digital self-administered questionnaire.
• Number of Items: 23 items (in the finalized psychometric version; originally 25 items prior to factorial pruning).
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 to 5:
  • 1 = Hardly any change
  • 2 = A little change
  • 3 = Some change
  • 4 = Much change
  • 5 = Changed very much
• Subscales:
  • Outdoor Activities: 14 items assessing behavioral changes in commerce, public transport, religious worship, and community socializing.
  • Personal Development/Family-Oriented Activities: 9 items assessing modifications in family dynamics, domestic activities, self-learning, and health habits.
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Subscale scores are calculated by summing the ratings of the respective items or by computing the mean item score across each dimension.
  • A composite total score can be derived by summing all 23 items (score range: 23 to 115), with higher scores reflecting greater overall behavioral adjustment to the pandemic-induced “new normal.”
  • Mean scoring (dividing the raw sum by the number of items) preserves the original 1 to 5 metric, where a score of 1 represents negligible adaptation and 5 signifies comprehensive lifestyle transformation.
• Target Population: Human adults (≥ 18 years of age), including young adults (18–29), individuals in their thirties (30–39), middle-aged adults (40–64), and older adults (≥ 65 years).
• Language Available: English (official administrative language in Ghana).
• Administration Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Development: 2023.
• Authors / Copyright Holders: Elias Kodjo Kekesi, Collins Badu Agyemang, and David Lackland Sam.
• Commercial Fee: None. The instrument was developed for academic, scientific, and public health research purposes.
• Permissions and Access: While the overarching study was published in open-access scientific literature, use of the complete survey inventory requires contacting the corresponding author:
  • Corresponding Author: Dr. Elias Kodjo Kekesi
  • Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Ghana
  • Postal Address: P.O. Box LG 84, Legon-Accra, Ghana
  • Email: [email protected]

12. References

Kekesi, E. K., Agyemang, C. B., & Sam, D. L. (2023). Assessing levels of knowledge, compliance with preventive measures and behavioral adjustments to the ‘new normal’ of COVID-19: Empirical evidence from Ghana. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 5, Article 100168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cresp.2023.100168

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.

Horn, J. L. (1965). A rationale and test for the number of factors in factor analysis. Psychometrika, 30(2), 179–185. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02289447

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.

Rosenstock, I. M. (1974). Historical origins of the Health Belief Model. Health Education Monographs, 2(4), 328–335. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019817400200403

13. Items of the Scale