Network analysis of relationship in hobbies interest among 50 countries and the changes from COVID-19

Abstract

While the uncertainty from COVID-19 persists throughout the globe, the impact it triggered is not only limited to physical health issues. The pandemic forced people to adapt in many aspects. People’s behaviours and perceptions has shifted throughout the pandemic. Though, inhabitants of distinct culture perceive and react to things differently. There are findings that the COVID-19 pandemic has an effect on individuals and society perception. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic strongly influences cultural orientation. Leisure activity, which is one of many approaches to express cultures, is a focus of this research. The research is intended to spot global connection patterns in hobby interest and learn how the patterns has changed by the occurrence of pre and post COVID-19 with network graphs visualization. In the last decade, Google Trends has been proven to be a promising tool in behavioural science studies. It allows researchers to draw summarized time-series data from the sample size of global Google users for free. One of its tools accumulates different search queries that belong to the same topic in different synonyms and languages as a topic which is essentially useful. This research has collected scaled data of ten selected hobbies, in fifty top internet user (2020) countries from January 1st, 2018 thru April 30st, 2022 with Google Trends topics. This work marks the period before March 11th,2020 as pre-pandemic and the period from this date as post-pandemic according to the World Health Organization’s announcement. This paper then calculate correlation matrices and visualize with network graphs. The analysis shows significant adjustments in global relationship patterns affected by the pandemic in most search topics.