3.2. Data Sampling and Collection
Random sampling and snowball sampling techniques were used to collect the data. It was impossible for us to go to Wuhan due to quarantine during the outbreak. We were quarantined by ourselves. To avoid this hindrance on data collection, we decided to collect data online. We sent our questionnaire to the people of Wuhan and Anhui provinces. Data was collected during the COVID-19 quarantine period, which has been in place for almost one month and continued during the research. Most of the participants were Chinese; however, we also included foreigners living in Wuhan and Anhui because of their presence. However, due to various countries’ evacuation policies, we decided to exclude the foreigners’ data. Due to the mixed participants of our study, we used two versions of the questionnaire to overcome any language barrier. We used an English version for data collection from foreigners and a Chinese version for the domestic population in Wuhan and Anhui.
To increase interest and willingness of participants we sent them HONGBAO (lucky money) to the group owners of Wechat through Wechat (only owners, not the participants). We collected data from 704 people (still ongoing, the corresponding author is willing to help any researchers with future research). In total, the participants included 315 men and rest were women (we aimed to obtain participants equally from both sexes). Due to online foreigners’ evacuation during data collection, we excluded 21 records during analysis and used 683 valid samples for analysis. After the evacuation policy implementation, we decided to stop the collection from foreigners. The demographic characteristics of our research data are provided in Table 1. Moreover, the itemized sources of constructs used in the research are given in Table 2.