Matthew Keeler
Professor Vejdemo-Johansson
HON 223
November 21, 2021
One article that I found interesting when searching through various sources was “Americans Drank and Smoked More During the Pandemic, Study Shows” by Julia Musto posted in the New York Post. The article introduces the idea that while the stay-at-home orders and quarantines were in effect, society was not only affected with diseases from Covid-19, but impacted the way that people functioned in their daily lives. Within this article they identified the Health, Ethnicity, and Pandemic (HEAP) study that was conducted in October of 2020, which was carried out by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The roughly 3,000 people chosen were to report their lifestyle behaviors before and during the pandemic, and their results were analyzed to identify any decrease in essential activities and any increase in factors that will negatively impact their health and behavior. Along with the percent increase or decrease this article also discusses the idea that there were subgroups that were more susceptible to these pandemic influences and notes that there needs to be steps taken to maintain and get back to the lifestyle they had before the pandemic. Overall, within this news article I realized that this went into the actual statistical findings of the study and identifies the future processes needed as also discussed within the study itself. This article includes a lot more data than previous articles I have read because in the title it explicitly refers to a study, so they aren’t skewing information to vaguely discuss the research, in fact it is the main highlight.
When reading through the abstract of the research paper I noticed that it is very similar to the way that the news article was structured. The abstract of the research paper essentially was structured with the same information from the New York Post article in which it introduces the study and relays background information as to why the study was conducted. However, the abstract does give a little bit more information regarding the actual numbers of the overall impact of the pandemic and highlights the fact that all the negative lifestyle behaviors increased, while those essential to our overall well-being decreased as society was forced inside unless essentially needed for work. The news article takes influence from the abstract as at the end it discusses the idea of separating the people into subgroups to see the effects on people depending on their race, ethnicity, and their age. Essentially, the research paper itself follows this same format once again, but when it comes to the results and data referring to the changes of behavior, they go more in depth into the percent change and utilize various graphs and tables to visualize the effect with the different variables. A portion of their results also details each identification of behaviors such as drinking, smoking, fast-food consumption, and lack of exercise, but is broken down by race, age, and even income to show the rates varied based on the subgroup the people tested were divided into. Although this does not provide long-term information it shows the immediate impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and does not discuss how these numbers may fluctuate after the pandemic and what this means for the future of our country.
Overall, the New York Post article, abstract, and the research paper ended up correlating with each other and relayed the same information consistently throughout. Typically, the news article would write in a way to just gage the reader’s interest and let them explore more on their own if they would like, but I believe it offered a very accurate summary of the study itself. It captured the main highlights from the paper and the study and clearly portrayed the results that can be seen statistically throughout the paper itself. Since the news article seemed to be based mostly on the abstract and pulling quotes from the article to summarize the in-depth data collection they went through, the three all matched up with no discrepancies and they all flowed well with another to create the same overarching idea that was concluded from the study.
Works Cited
Chen, Liwei, et al. “Changes of Exercise, Screen Time, Fast Food Consumption, Alcohol, and Cigarette Smoking during the COVID-19 Pandemic among Adults in the United States.” Nutrients 13.10 (2021): 3359.
News, F. (2021, October 15). Americans drank and smoked more during the pandemic, study shows. New York Post. Retrieved November 20, 2021, from https://nypost.com/2021/10/15/americans-drank-smoked-more-in-the-pandemic-study-shows/.
