TRA Research releases white-paper on findings conducted across 16 cities from April 10-22, 2020

According to the white-paper, overall effectiveness of lockdown decision across cities was at 91 per cent, with five of 16 cities giving it above 98 per cent or ‘Excellent’ score

TRA Research released its white-paper on the findings of its research survey conducted across 16 cities from April 10-22, 2020. The white-paper titled ‘TRA’s Coronavirus Consumer Insights 2020’ is based on a research conducted across 16 cities with 902 urban citizens and delves into their perceptions, attitudes, worries, fears and expectations who have been under voluntary house-arrest for nearly a month.

According to the white-paper, the overall effectiveness of the lockdown decision across cities was at 91 per cent, with five of the 16 cities giving it above 98 per cent or ‘Excellent’ score. However the overall implementation of the same across cities was much lower, at 74 per cent. Speaking about the findings in the white-paper, N Chandramouli, CEO, TRA Research said, “The Lockdown decision and implementation had a significant gap of 24 per cent in terms of effectiveness. There are also big gaps in information and knowledge about the Coronavirus transmission, especially in two age brackets, 21-24 years and 46-50 years. The same information gap is seen across cities, barring Mumbai. The misinformation is impacting the attitudes and actions of citizens, for example the belief that eating meat or eggs would.”

“Consumers’ trust on India’s health ability to combat crisis is considerably high, at 73 per cent, which translates as ‘Good’, while their trust on India’s economic ability to combat crisis is significantly lower at 63 per cent, showing that the fears of a long term financial and economic impact are prominent on the minds of the citizens,” added Chandramouli.

On coping with the crisis, children were affected and data showed that this was not getting recognised and addressed by the family as the coping indices were significantly different for both. “Perhaps parents take the tantrums and confusion children face during lockdown as they would in normal times, often not addressing it directly. This is clearly indicated in the wide gap between the coping scores of children and the family. It is most important that parents take cognisance of the fact that children are going through extreme trauma during the lockdown, and need to take the time and effort to explain and guide their children through with empathy and love.”

In the Family Worry Index, the highest concern across cities was that the family may contract the disease (74 per cent), job / business loss was the second biggest concern (68 per cent), and delayed salary was third (62 per cent). Lucknow displayed the highest Family Worry Index at 85 per cent, followed by Nagpur at 81 per cent. The survey found that the Economic Impact Worry Index was at 66 per cent, showing that the personal worries overshadowed any other worry of the citizens.

While most cities are relatively aware about the disease symptoms, they are considerably ill informed about the disease spread. Misinformation is highest about disease spread in Delhi followed by Chandigarh. Delhi however scored the highest in terms of the knowledge on symptoms, followed by Mumbai which was nearly two-third lower in this quotient.