COVID-19's Impact on Women’s Wellness: Implications for Social Work Practice

Overview: This presentation will discuss a study developed to learn about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women's wellbeing and their ability to engage in dance and/or movement activities to support their overall emotional, physical and social health. Implications for social work practice and education will also be explored.Proposal text: It is well established in the literature that movement can provide benefits to people’s overall well-being (Petruzzello et al., 1991). Movement has been defined in a variety of ways including aerobic exercise and meditation (Alpert, 2011). There have been studies that have investigated the impact of movement on mental health outcomes (Kvam et al., 2016; Rebar et al, 2015), on health-related outcomes (Anderson & Shivakumar, 2013; Norouzi, 2019), and on wellness (Lewis-Smith et al., 2018; Lumsden, Niles, & Macrae, 2014).

Physical activity can work to boost one's emotional and physical health. Some studies have found that regular physical activity can even help to increase immune responses and decrease vulnerability to new or chronic conditions (Campbell and Turner, 2018; US Department of Health and Human Services, 2018). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control (2020) has encouraged all people to try and engage in physical activity while also following social distancing guidelines. So, if engaging in movement or dance activities can help people, specifically women, during this very stressful time, it is important to determine how and to what degree they are successfully engaging in these activities.

During the summer of 2020, a study was created to investigate how COVID-19 pandemic was impacting women’s ability to engage in dance and movement activity and if there was an impact on their overall wellbeing. For the purposes of this study, "dance" was defined as any form of creative, rhythmic movements usually put to music, but not always (Mackrell, 2020). And "movement" was defined as any activity that requires a person to engage in aerobic (increased heart rate) and/or physical exertion (for example: yoga, walking, jogging, skating, jumping up and down in place, martial arts, gymnastics, hiking, riding a bike, weight lifting, swimming, etc) (Marmeleira and Duarte, 2019; Savage et al., 2021)

A snowball sampling approach was used to distribute the measure to women across the United States, with a focus on women of color. The initial recruitment emails were sent to professional listservs within social work and related professions. In addition, the emails went out to churches and women’s organizations in the local area.

More than 500 women completed the anonymous survey, which provided both quantitative and qualitative results. Preliminary analyses indicate that is some relationship between level of activity and race as well as marital status. In addition, there also appear to be differences along level of activity and how women’s emotional and social wellbeing were impacted. This presentation will further explore these findings and how participants were impacted by the stress of the recent public health crisis.

This presentation will also highlight how social work practitioners and educators can use insights from these results to develop culturally responsive intervention approaches for women, especially women of color, to help elevate their overall emotional, physical and social wellbeing.