Diabetesvid: Web Survey Methods for Diabetes Self-Care and Resilience in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil

de Oliveira, Rinaldo Eduardo Machado de Almeida-Pititto Bianca Binhardi Bárbara Aparecida Barbosa Francisco Franco Laercio Joel de Melo Karla Fabiana Santana Malerbi Domingos Augusto Cherino Teixeira Carla Regina de Souza

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.