Subjective Perceptions, Perspectives, and Feelings on the COVID-19 Pandemic personal experiences in two cities: Milan, Italy, EU and New York City, NY, USA.

The dataset we provide is composed of a CSV file containing the answers of responders to our questionnaire conducted to explore perceptions and feelings on the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey was conducted from June 27 to July 2 2022 among university students and adult residents of Milan, Italy, and New York City, NY, U.S.A. The two target demographics for this study were adult residents of the two cities who were employed at the beginning of 2020 and students who attended university during 2020 or joined during the pandemic. The survey was accompanied by a promotional video and an introductory paragraph describing the objective of the study. It was shared through social media platforms, on specialized social media groups, and on university students’ mailing lists. The total number of questions asked is a maximum of 20, variable depending on answers given by a user since we employed branching based on previous answers. This feature was particularly useful in creating questions that were specific to a subset of the sample population The topics of questions cover the following broad areas: Relationships: Multiple Choice and sorting/ranking questions designed to understand who the respondents spent lockdown with, if they managed to keep in touch with those they could not meet, and to family, friends, and intimate relationships during the pandemic Policies: Likert scale questions measuring agreement with measures put in place in both Milan and New York Personal Life: questions about one’s priorities before and during the pandemic Occupation: Multiple Choice questions about one’s occupation during the pandemic and feelings towards work or university Post-pandemic: Likert scale questions about one's perception of contagion threats and feelings of normalcy at the time they responded to the survey Demographics: Multiple choice questions to describe the pool of respondents and control sample bias The types of questions are one of the following: Multiple choice (one or more selections or single selection); Ranking; and Numeric scale (1-5 or 1-10). The “ranking” question type allowed users to sort a list of items in descending order of importance. In the dataset the column name represents the ranking given to the item, e.g. 1. highest priority. (2023-02-03)