An informal survey from the University of Nebraska Medical Center finds a majority of Nebraskans would support a statewide mask mandate.
About 8,000 people from across the state responded to the online survey for about a week starting Nov. 11. 86% said they support or strongly support a statewide mask mandate, while 83% said they support restricting indoor dining and limiting gatherings to 10 people.
Brandon Grimm, associate dean of public health practice at UNMC, says this was a cross-sectional survey that followed the principles of practice-based systems research. The five-question survey recruited respondents on social media using a snowball approach, a non-probability sampling method.
Grimm says while it is difficult to say that the results are representative of the entire population, it is an accepted way to get a snapshot or pulse of a population using limited resources in a short time period.
"If you know anything about academic research, it takes us a long time to do anything," Grimm said. "So this was one way we could do it as more of a poll of Nebraska in the quickest way possible."
The main limitation of collecting survey respondents via social media is it may introduce self-selection bias that can lead to representative and generalizability issues.
Grimm says they got far more responses than they expected. About 24% of people said they work in K-12 education, and about 16% represent a for-profit business.
Nebraskans in rural areas were a little less likely to support a statewide mask mandate, but Grimm says even in those areas at least 75% of people are supportive. All but seven of Nebraska's 93 counties had at least one respondent. And about 45% of respondents were from outside of Douglas and Lancaster Counties.
Gov. Pete Ricketts has resisted a statewide mandate, saying he believes they breed resistance. Ricketts dismissed the survey at a news conference Wednesday afternoon, calling it "unscientific."
"We're basing our decisions based upon our hospitalizations and we're going to continue to base it on that," Ricketts said at a news conference Wednesday.
Current state regulations do require masks in businesses where people are within six feet of each other for at least 15 minutes.
Grimm says the methods used meet academic standards and are used often in public health to learn the perceptions of communities. He says this kind of timely data is important because even if research shows a mitigation measure works, that strategy may be ineffective if there is a lot of public opposition.
"If the results of the survey would have shown opposition to these measures, we would have shared them," Grimm said in an email after the Governor's statement.
Grimm says they've shared the survey results with regional health departments as one tool to help make decisions. They'll keep collecting responses over the next few months.