In our study, the pandemic context was important to consider as people’s mental health suffered generally during these times. However, we were able to control for participants mental health, wellbeing and work situation before the pandemic using existing longitudinal datasets, to better isolate the effect of working from home on mental health.
Restrictions and advice also changed a lot at russia rcs data different stages of the pandemic. In the first lockdown, everyone apart from keyworkers were forced to work from home. In the summer of 2020, restrictions eased, and people were encouraged to go back to work if they could adhere to social distancing. In the winter of 2020/21, restrictions were re-introduced, and people were again forced to work from home. The figure below shows the proportion of people working at home or at employer’s premises across these periods.
We used data from seven longitudinal studies that existed before the pandemic, so that we could include a large and representative sample of working aged people in the UK and consider people’s pre-pandemic work situation and mental health. This was important to be sure that our findings were accurate and not due to a sampling bias.