Going Virtual: Building Online Collaborations to Understand COVID-19’s Psychosocial Impacts on New York City Adults

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic altered the research landscape dramatically, but the need to understand impacts on communities through research was as great as ever. In this paper, we detail the adaptive processes we leveraged to bring a network of community and academic partners together virtually and collaboratively build a survey reaching diverse populations, the challenges we faced, and what ultimately facilitated our success. The largest driver of our work was our shared goal of gaining a better understanding of the psychosocial impacts of the pandemic on New Yorkers in order to address their needs more meaningfully. Pre-existing relationships with community partners and flexible working processes grounded in equity also supported the functioning of the team. While participant recruitment proved to be challenging, the team pivoted and employed several strategies to reach our intended audiences and increase participation. This paper includes community stakeholders’ reflections on facilitators and barriers to survey development and recruitment in the context of a pandemic, as well as considerations for moving forward with virtual community-engaged research under challenging circumstances. In addition to sharing the collaborative processes that we built, our research-to-action network’s outputs, and our reflections on successes and roadblocks we faced, this paper highlights lessons in the importance of flexibility, trust, and innovation when conducting collaborative research during rapidly evolving public health crises.