The Epidemic–Pandemic Impacts Inventory (EPII): A multisample study examining pandemic-related experiences and their relation to mental health.

Abstract

The Epidemic–Pandemic Impacts Inventory (EPII) was developed to assess pandemic-related adverse and positive experiences across several key domains, including work/employment, home life, isolation, and quarantine. Several studies have associated EPII-assessed pandemic-related experiences with a wide range of psychosocial factors, most commonly depressive and anxiety symptoms. The present study investigated the degree to which specific types of COVID-19 pandemic-related experiences may be associated with anxiety and depression risk, capitalizing on two large, independent samples with marked differences in sociodemographic characteristics. The present study utilized two adult samples: participants (N = 635) recruited online over a 4-week period in early 2020 (Sample 1) and participants (N = 908) recruited from the student body of a large Northeastern public university (Sample 2). We employed a cross-validated, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression approach, as well as a random forest (RF) machine learning algorithm, to investigate classification accuracy of anxiety/depression risk using the pandemic-related experiences from the EPII. The LASSO approach isolated eight items within each sample. Two items from the work/employment and emotional/physical health domains overlapped across samples. The RF approach identified similar items across samples. Both methods yielded acceptable cross-classification accuracy. Applying two analytic approaches on data from two large, sociodemographically unique samples, we identified a subset of sample-specific and nonspecific pandemic-related experiences from the EPII that are most predictive of concurrent depression/anxiety risk. Findings may help to focus on key experiences during future public health disasters that convey greater risk for depression and anxiety symptoms.

Clinical assessment in the time of COVID-19: Introduction to the special issue.

“…This suggests the importance of considering individual experiences of mental health problems, but also assessment of the ways in which the pandemic caused difficulties and disruption in a person’s life. The set of articles focused on pandemic-specific tests (Blackwell et al, 2023; Blázquez-Rincón et al, 2023; Janssen et al, 2023; Prati & Mancini, 2023) provided good validity data on a number of instruments that could be useful in both research and clinical settings to assess pandemic impact.…”

“…Two articles assessed existing pandemic instruments. Janssen et al (2023) examined the EPII and associations between specific pandemic experiences and depression/anxiety risk using two large community and university samples in the United States in 2020. Though a body of work has already accumulated on the EPII, Janssen et al centered their study around identifying specific COVID-19 related experiences on the 92-item EPII that pose the greatest risk using machine learning statistical techniques.…”