Romanians' insatisfaction regarding the anti-Covid measures taken by the government at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic – statistical study, april 2020

Abstract

We will analyze to what extent Romanians are not satisfied with the antiCovid actions promoted by the Romanian government during April 2020. This period marks the debut quarter of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe. The present topic has been approached by the author before, but taking into account the period of May 2021, that is, little more than a year since the onset of the pandemic in the European area. The current paper fits into a series of analyses of the dynamics of Romanian government anti-Covid measures in the period 2020-2022. The research was carried out on a questionnaire basis, being interviewed in April 2020 a number of 1017 people from Romania. Specifically, the question act1ro used in this study has the following wording: "How satisfied or not are you with the measures of your government has taken so far against the coronavirus pandemic?". Interviewees in the Eurobarometer have several possible responses: Very satisfied (R1); Fairly satisfied (R2); Not very satisfied (R3); Not at all satisfied (R4); Don't know/Not applicable (DK). We mention that the Eurobarometer records were weighted, thus maintaining, in the last sample that is analyzed, the real proportions of the main socio-demographic characteristics of the Romanians from the beginning of 2020 year. In the statistical models used, the variable act1ro is a category variable of ordinal type with four ordinal classes R1-R4. The statistical processing of the data took also into account several individual characteristics X of respondents to the Eurobarometer questionnaire. We note in this context the following attributes X: the respondent's gender, the age category, the level of education, the work status, the social class of the individual, the attitude of the families with minor children, the development region of Romania to which belongs the respondent. In general, interpreting in this research the value of the Goodman-Kruskal association index GK(X, act1ro) we cannot speak of a significant association relationship between an individual characteristic X specified above and the individual's answers to the act1ro question. The application of a chi-squared statistical test of homogeneity allows us to decide whether the distributions of Romanians' opinions to the question act1ro could be considered the same from a statistical point of view in relation to an individual characteristic X specified before. The graphs of the two-dimensional distributions (X, act1ro) make it possible to nuance the dependence relations between the categorical variables X and act1ro.