Democratic research: Setting up a research commons for a qualitative, comparative, longitudinal interview study during the COVID-19 pandemic

Swiss residents' information behavior perceptions during the COVID-19 pandemic: A longitudinal qualitative study

People's information behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic was challenged through vast amounts of information, misinformation, and disinformation. This study sets out to address the research gap of longitudinal, qualitative inquiries about how people's information behavior changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to assess how residents of German-speaking Switzerland perceived and evaluated information gathering during a global health crisis. As part of the "Solidarity in Times of a Pandemic" (SolPan) Research Commons, 83 semi-structured interviews with residents of German-speaking Switzerland were conducted in April 2020 (T1), October 2020 (T2), and October 2021 (T3). People were asked about their lived experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Qualitative data analysis followed a reflexive thematic analysis approach, using Wilson's model of information behavior as a theoretical framework. Participants perceived high-quality journalistic news media, the Swiss national government, scientific experts, and their direct social environment as trustworthy information sources. They were motivated to gather information through the wish of gaining agency and certainty in the context of a major, global health crisis. Intervening variables that hindered information seeking included a perceived lack of agency, habituation effects in the later stages of the pandemic, information overload, inconsistent information, and conspiracy theories. While information needs were generally high in T1, participants expressed a growing extent of information fatigue in T2. In T3, the most prominent themes were conflicting information and differing interpretations, which led to an increased perception of societal polarization, which was perceived as a direct consequence of participants' information behavior. This finding is contextualized through established models of attitude formation: The study indicates how participants formed rather stable attitudes over time and how this led to a growing polarization and societal segmentation as the pandemic progressed. Practical implications regarding how to meet such societal polarization during crises are discussed.

Solidarity and reciprocity during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal qualitative interview study from Germany

BACKGROUND

While solidarity practices were important in mitigating the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, their limits became evident as the pandemic progressed. Taking a longitudinal approach, this study analyses German residents' changing perceptions of solidarity practices during the COVID-19 pandemic and examines potential reasons for these changes.

METHODS

Adults living in Germany were interviewed in April 2020 (n = 46), October 2020 (n = 43) and October 2021 (n = 40) as part of the SolPan Research Commons, a large-scale, international, qualitative, longitudinal study uniquely situated in a major global public health crisis. Interviews were analysed using qualitative content analysis.

RESULTS

While solidarity practices were prominently discussed and positively evaluated in April 2020, this initial enthusiasm waned in October 2020 and October 2021. Yet, participants still perceived solidarity as important for managing the pandemic and called for institutionalized forms of solidarity in October 2020 and October 2021. Reasons for these changing perceptions of solidarity included (i) increasing personal and societal costs to act in solidarity, (ii) COVID-19 policies hindering solidarity practices, and (iii) a perceived lack of reciprocity as participants felt that solidarity practices from the state were not matching their individual efforts.

CONCLUSIONS

Maintaining solidarity contributes to maximizing public health during a pandemic. Institutionalized forms of solidarity to support those most in need contribute to perceived reciprocity among individuals, which might increase their motivation to act in solidarity. Thus, rather than calling for individual solidarity during times of crisis, authorities should consider implementing sustaining solidarity-based social support systems that go beyond immediate crisis management.

Solidarity during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from a nine-country interview study in Europe

Calls for solidarity have been an ubiquitous feature in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we know little about how people have thought of and practised solidarity in their everyday lives since the beginning of the pandemic. What role does solidarity play in people's lives, how does it relate to COVID-19 public health measures and how has it changed in different phases of the pandemic? Situated within the medical humanities at the intersection of philosophy, bioethics, social sciences and policy studies, this article explores how the practice-based understanding of solidarity formulated by Prainsack and Buyx helps shed light on these questions. Drawing on 643 qualitative interviews carried out in two phases (April-May 2020 and October 2020) in nine European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, German-speaking Switzerland and the UK), the data show that interpersonal acts of solidarity are important, but that they are not sustainable without consistent support at the institutional level. As the pandemic progressed, respondents expressed a longing for more institutionalised forms of solidarity. We argue that the medical humanities have much to gain from directing their attention to individual health issues, and to collective experiences of health or illness. The analysis of experiences through a collective lens such as solidarity offers unique insights to understandings of the individual and the collective. We propose three essential advances for research in the medical humanities that can help uncover collective experiences of disease and health crises: (1) an empirical and practice-oriented approach alongside more normative approaches; (2) the confidence to make recommendations for practice and policymaking and (3) the pursuit of cross-national and multidisciplinary research collaborations.

Narratives about distributed health literacy during the COVID-19 pandemic

The promotion of health literacy was a key public health strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the role of social networks and relationships for support with health literacy-related tasks in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic is scarcely understood. Moving beyond traditional notions of health literacy, which focus on individual skills and knowledge, this study uses the concept of distributed health literacy to explore how individuals make meaning of and respond to health literacy and make their literacy skills available to others through their relational and socially situated and lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on 89 semi-structured interviews conducted in three European countries (Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland) between October and December 2021, we found narratives of stabilization, hybridization, and disruption that show how health literacy concerning COVID-19 is a complex social construct intertwined with emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses distributed among individuals, communities, and institutions within socioeconomic and political contexts that affect their existence. This paper opens new empirical directions to understand the critical engagement of individuals and communities toward health information aimed at making sense of a complex and prolonged situation of uncertainty in a pandemic.

The social and socio-political embeddedness of COVID-19 vaccination decision-making: A five-country qualitative interview study from Europe

The uptake ofCOVID-19 vaccines has varied considerably across European countries. This study investigates people's decision-making process regarding vaccination by analyzing qualitative interviews (n = 214) with residents from five European countries: Austria, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland. We identify three factors that shape vaccination decision-making: individual experiences and pre-existing attitudes towards vaccination, social environment, and socio-political context. Based on this analysis, we present a typology of decision-making regarding COVID-19 vaccines, where some types present stable stances towards vaccines and others change over time. Trust in government and relevant stakeholders, broader social factors, and people's direct social environment were particularly relevant to these dynamics. We conclude that vaccination campaigns should be considered long-term projects (also outside of pandemics) in need of regular adjustment, communication and fine-tuning to ensure public trust. This is particularly pertinent for booster vaccinations, such as COVID-19 or influenza.

Toward global citizenship? People (de)bordering their lives during COVID-19 in Latin America and Europe

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted global interdependencies, accompanied by widespread calls for worldwide cooperation against a virus that knows no borders, but responses were led largely separately by national governments. In this tension between aspiration and reality, people began to grapple with how their own lives were affected by the global nature of the pandemic. In this article, based on 493 qualitative interviews conducted between 2020 and 2021, we explore how people in Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Ireland, Italy and Mexico experienced, coped with and navigated the global nature of the pandemic. In dialogue with debates about the parameters of the 'global' in global health, we focus on what we call people's everyday (de)bordering practices to examine how they negotiated (dis)connections between 'us' and 'them' during the pandemic. Our interviewees' reactions moved from national containment to an increasing focus on people's unequal socio-spatial situatedness. Eventually, they began to (de)border their lives beyond national lines of division and to describe a new normal: a growing awareness of global connectedness and a desire for global citizenship. This newfound sense of global interrelatedness could signal support for and encourage transnational political action in times of crises.

Inequalities in the Challenges Affecting Children and their Families during COVID-19 with School Closures and Reopenings: A Qualitative Study

School closure is one of the most debated measures undertaken to contain the spread of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. The pandemic has devastating health and socio-economic effects and must be contained, but schools play a vital role in present and future well-being, capabilities and health of children. We examine the detrimental consequences of both the closure and reopening of schools, by focusing on inequalities in the challenges affecting children and their families. This paper is grounded on Irish and Italian data from a multi-national longitudinal qualitative interview study. Research participants articulated a variety of issues and challenges that highlight inequalities in access to education during school closures, in the supportiveness of home setting, and in school preparedness to reopen, often mirroring or exacerbating pre-existing inequalities. The reported unequal lived experiences indicate that some harms are actionable, and already suggest some potential harm mitigation strategies. We conclude by advocating for enhanced public consultation to help mitigate the consequences of public dilemmas in general, and to help detect and tackle inadequacies and inequalities for school children through and beyond the pandemic, by learning from the experience of the concerned actors.