DIABETESvid: Web survey methods for diabetes self-care and resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil

Abstract

Aim: To describe Brazilian web survey methods termed DIABETESvid by assessing the diabetic individuals’ self-care practices and their resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study on data collected from web surveys in the period between 1st September and 19th October 2020, in which socio-demographic, clinical, self-care and resilience variables were investigated. A questionnaire was elaborated and implemented by using the Research Electronic Data Capture platform. Results: A total of 1,633 participants were eligible for this study, with a higher frequency of females, 46.5% being aged between 18 and 39 years old, 40.9% being diagnosed with diabetes within 1 to 10 years and all having high level of education. Most of the participants was living in south-eastern Brazil, self-reported type 1 diabetes mellitus and had access to the survey link on WhatsApp. In this 7-week study, it was evidenced that the survey response rate was higher in the first week (38.5%) and number of accesses were increased on Thursdays (20.2%) and in the night (40.2%). Conclusion: The method used here can be useful as a baseline for future web surveys involving diabetic individuals so that several analyses can be conducted in the clinical care and academic contexts.

Keywords

• Epidemiological surveys
• Epidemiological methods
• COVID-19
• Diabetes mellitus
• Chronic disease