Social Cohesion and Community Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Northern Romania

Social Cohesion and COVID-19: Integrative Review

BACKGROUND

Nations of considerable wealth and sophisticated health care infrastructures have experienced high rates of illness and death from COVID-19. Others with limited economic means and less developed health systems have achieved much lower burdens. To build a full understanding, an appraisal of the contribution of social relationships is necessary. Social cohesion represents a promising conceptual tool.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to examine scholarship on social cohesion during the COVID-19 pandemic: specifically, the constructions of social cohesion being deployed, the variables chosen for representation, and the effects of and on social cohesion being reported.

METHODS

The PubMed, Scopus, and JSTOR databases were searched for relevant journal articles and gray literature. A total of 100 studies met the inclusion criteria. Data were extracted and analyzed from these using spreadsheet software.

RESULTS

Several constructions of social cohesion were found. These concerned interpersonal relationships, sameness and difference, collective action, perceptions or emotions of group members, structures and institutions of governance, locally or culturally specific versions, and hybrid or multidimensional models. Social cohesion was reported to be influential on health outcomes, health behaviors, resilience, and emotional well-being, but there was some potential for it to drive undesirable outcomes. Scholarship reported increases or decreases in quantitative measures of social cohesion, a temporary "rally round the flag" effect early in the pandemic, the variable impacts of policy on social cohesion, and changing interpersonal relationships due to the pandemic conditions. There are numerous issues with the literature that reflect the well-documented limitations of popular versions of the concept.

CONCLUSIONS

Social cohesion has been used to express a range of different aspects of relationships during the pandemic. It is claimed to promote better health outcomes, more engagement with positive health behaviors, and greater resilience and emotional well-being. The literature presents a range of ways in which it has been altered by the pandemic conditions. There are significant weaknesses to this body of knowledge that greatly impede its overall quality.

Social resilience indicators for pandemic crises

Coping and recovery capabilities in disasters depend to a large part on the social resilience of the societies or regions that are hit by the respective disruptions. Prior disaster studies suggest a variety of indicators to assess social resilience in the natural hazard context. This paper discusses whether the most common disaster-related social resilience indicators, including social cohesion and support, can meaningfully capture social resilience in pandemic crises, since pandemics typically entail physical distancing and other social restrictions. Based on a review of frequently used social resilience measures, this study proposes pandemic-tailored indicators of social resilience to map a society's or region's coping and recovery capabilities in a meaningful way. Applying the suggested set of indicators to a sample of 1,500 residents surveyed in Switzerland during the summer 2020 phase of the COVID-19 crisis revealed low levels of social support and community engagement, but a high level of willingness to help others.

Sustainable Smart Cities-Social Media Platforms and Their Role in Community Neighborhood Resilience-A Systematic Review

The COVID-19 pandemic took most communities off guard and has highlighted gaps in community preparedness and resilience in spite of the numerous technological advancements and the variety of available social media platforms that many relied on during lockdown periods. This served to emphasise the necessity for exploring the roles of social media and smart city technologies in mitigating pandemic impacts. In this systematic literature review, we examined twelve articles on social media usage and smart city technologies and their contributions to community resilience during COVID-19. The analysis focused on the use of social media platforms and smart city technologies during and after lockdown periods, examining their role in fostering community resilience. Results indicate that social media and smart city technologies were instrumental in helping communities adapt and recover from the pandemic. While past studies have examined community resilience, social media, or smart cities separately, there is limited literature collating insights on the three elements combined. We therefore argue that these technologies, employed collaboratively, enhance community resilience during crises. Nevertheless, further research is recommended, particularly on urban resilience and comparative analyses to deepen our understanding of the complex interplay between these variables.

The role of school organizational conditions in teacher psychological resilience and stress during COVID-19 pandemic: A moderated mediation model

Educational revisions facilitate the relief of teacher stress by means of enhancing school organizational conditions. However, limited research has explored the effects of school organizational conditions on teacher stress in China. Using a sample of 734 primary and secondary school teachers from 30 provinces or municipalities of China, this study examined the effects of school organizational conditions on teacher stress in China, with a particular focus on the mediating role of psychological resilience and moderating role of perceived COVID-19 crisis strength. The results demonstrated that school organizational conditions were negatively associated with teacher stress. Furthermore, psychological resilience partially mediated the relation between school organizational conditions and teacher stress. In addition, perceived COVID-19 crisis strength significantly moderated the direct and indirect relations between school organizational conditions and teacher stress. The relations between school organizational conditions and teacher stress and between school organizational conditions and psychological resilience were stronger for teachers who perceived low levels of COVID-19 crisis strength. However, the indirect relation between psychological resilience and stress was stronger for teachers who perceived high levels of COVID-19 crisis strength. Implications have been provided accordingly.

Community Services and Social Involvement in COVID-19 Governance: Evidence from China

This study explores how the services provided by different types of Chinese communities varied in their impact on the social involvement of residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. The literature revealed problems caused by travel restrictions, including using oversimplified measures for grassroots governance, which might result in decreased residents' social involvement during COVID-19. We argue that the services provided by "smart communities" in China not only adhered to the COVID-19 pandemic governance, but also promoted the social involvement of residents. Using a case study approach of the smart community Fang Xing and the traditional community Qili Tang, both of which are located in China, this article compared the traditional and smart community services based on 122 interviews with residents and frontline community staff members. The findings suggest that while the traditional community decreased the residents' social involvement by restricting certain services during the pandemic, the smart community was able to apply COVID-19 governance measures, considerably increasing the residents' social involvement. It offered an attractive option for residents to act as community service managers, and it prepared them for local-level pandemic governance. This study provides an understanding of the relationship between the community services and the residents' social involvement in terms of the community services. The smart community model can act as a reference for international community development during pandemic governance.

Characteristics of Collective Resilience and Its Influencing Factors from the Perspective of Psychological Emotion: A Case Study of COVID-19 in China

Collective resilience is the ability of human beings to adapt and collectively cope with crises in adversity. Emotional expression is the core element with which to characterize the psychological dimension of collective resilience. This research proposed a stage model of collective resilience based on the temporal evolution of the public opinions of COVID-19 in China's first anti-pandemic cycle; using data from hot searches and commentaries on Sina Weibo, the changes in the emotional patterns of social groups are revealed through analyses of the sentiments expressed in texts. A grounded theory approach is used to elucidate the factors influencing collective resilience. The research results show that collective resilience during the pandemic exhibited an evolutionary process that could be termed, "preparation-process-recovery". Analyses of expressed sentiments reveal an evolutionary pattern of "positive emotion prevailing-negative emotion appearing-positive emotion recovering Collective resilience from a psycho-emotional perspective is the result of "basic cognition-intermediary condition-consequence" positive feedback, in which the basic cognition is expressed as will embeddedness and the intermediary conditions include the subject behavior and any associated derived behavioral characteristics and spiritual connotation. These results are significant both theoretically and practically with regard to the reconstruction of collective resilience when s' force majeure' event occur.

Modelers of students’ entrepreneurial intention during the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic times: The role of entrepreneurial university environment

This paper examines the shaping factors, drivers, and impact credentials of students’ entrepreneurial intention during the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed framework addresses the antecedents of entrepreneurial intention among students in Romania, focusing on three focal constructs, namely, risk-taking, proactiveness, and innovativeness, with a keen focus on the mediation effect of the entrepreneurial university environment. The study used self-reported data collected through an online questionnaire during November 2020–February 2021 from a sample of 1,411 students in western Romania. The methodology relies on two modern techniques of modeling cross-sectional data, namely, structural equation modeling (SEM) and Gaussian graphical models (GGMs). The main results highlight that the three constructs positively relate to students’ entrepreneurial intention in a comprehensive framework where the entrepreneurial university environment drives innovativeness. The paper brings forward, in an innovative way, that entrepreneurship education and training at the university level enhance students’ entrepreneurial intentions as it fosters the attainment of advanced knowledge and skills. The results are well associated with the start-up process as prerequisites for successful entrepreneurship engagement of youth in a globalized digital economy, particularly during this challenging pandemic outbreak, but also post-pandemic times. This research sheds new light on the essential role played by higher education institutions in providing advanced knowledge and necessary skills matched with the labor market needs, thus enhancing students’ innovativeness and their entrepreneurial intentions.