Publications

The book "Research in statu nascendi during the SARS-Cov-2 epidemic" is a record of the research dilemmas involved in carrying out a research project dedicated to finding answers to the questions of what the pandemic did to students, their behaviors and attitudes towards the institution of school, the teachers themselves, and what was also happening in their homes during the time of distance learning. The phrase "What did the pandemic do to us?" is rather colloquial, but it nevertheless hints at what the research aimed to do, namely to define the consequences of the time of the pandemic and distance learning in the individual lives of students as well as in their community lives at home, among peers, and at school. The book presents the formation of this project, the source of the researcher's own interest and his motivation to enter the space of the experienced time of pestilence. It describes the dilemmas of the penetrating sociologist, the researcher who must also overcome his own anxiety, fear, and resistance resulting from the epidemic threat, and at the same time cannot fall into nonchalance and ignore the real threats that affect both the subjects and the researchers. The author reveals various backstories of research thinking, conceptualization of the research design, but - what is particularly valuable - its operationalization, i.e. preparation of methods, techniques and research tools with their pilot use. Given that the pilot study was conducted both at the time of the "loosening of pandemic rigors" and their re-tightening, it is all the more intriguing what kind of shielding strategies, ensuring safety for both sides of the research contract, were used by the Author and his Team.

 

The study is an ongoing description of research conducted "here and now" during an ongoing crisis situation. For this reason, it bears the hallmarks of a unique research project, and due to the author's high level of self-reflexivity and his research experience in difficult situations and areas, it has the features of a mature and intriguing position. The first part of the study presents issues related to entering a time of contagion, with a factography of world-wide events creating an area of widespread risk and danger. Using references to sociological, philosophical or psychological literature, the context of the planned research and references to similar past events are shown. The author continually weaves into the flow of the narrative the dilemmas that he himself had to resolve in order to effectively and safely find his way in the research area. He presents the trajectory that he and his team had to follow from risk, through fear, to confidence in research. With detail, he describes in the referenced episodes successive examples of his own experience and how to neutralize the anxiety present on both sides. He generates and/or enters islands of safety that enable the implementation of the research procedure. At the same time, he develops an important document: "Ethical Research Protocol", which represents the essence of the contents presented.

 

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Young people coped with the stigma they were labeled by the national media as carriers of the coronavirus and 41.66% of respondents "did not react" to such a message, did not register in their consciousness the fact that they could be a threat to others. Among the important reflections that reached young respondents as a result of this stigma was sensitivity to the potential threat to their own family, household members, including seniors - grandmother and grandfather (if they live together). The fact that young people managed to cope with the stigma issue is also confirmed by the results referring to their mood and assessment of the situation one year after the "problem emerged". The vast majority of them had become accustomed to the narrative, and since they did not often experience their own illness and/or the illness of their peers, the thesis of their threatening others seemed all the more unrealistic. The other side of the same problem was the stigma directed toward the senior generation. Upon hearing that it is the oldest members of society who are most vulnerable to illness and consequently death, young people were worried about this (62.81%), while they were not paralyzed by this information, on the contrary, it increased in them the desire to help and be useful. A quarter of the respondents do not believe in the virus as a biological fact, but despite this distrust they are taking action in the sanitation regime to support seniors. The timing of the pandemic seems to have disrupted many logics and triggered many adaptive and rationalizing strategies. Among them is this dichotomy: distrust vs. the higher good and helping.

 

In the behavior and attitudes of the young person, a reactive closure syndrome appears, consisting in the fact that on the one hand the individual is subjected to the stimulation of the content of the messages that reach him or her, and on the other hand to the forms with which he or she cannot cope. In this case, there is content-related stimulation - young people receive information that is difficult to understand (cognitive aspect), to accept (social trust aspect), to internalize (aspect of content source credibility), to bear (emotional aspect), to grasp (aspect of content absorption capability). Also in the context of form, the prescriptive mode (sanitary regime - higher rations) combined with deprivation (cognitive and functional shock) often functioned in the media message. Through shocking images and hysterical narrative, there was an intensification of anxiety, fear, insecurity and consequently social withdrawal. There was a cascade of funeral stories and, as a result, a sense of helplessness and entrapment - isolation seemed a sensible option at the time. The real-life experience of covid stories from the neighborhood, one's own home, and peer narratives came to the young. Additionally, there was an excess of demonizing the pandemic situation and its effects in media narratives. There was the paradox of nesting in the network, that is, recognizing it as their friendly habitus (treating the network as a safe niche where they find a relatively free place from an excess of bad information, emotions, and stimuli, where they can find like-minded people, make friends, and just function normally). At the same time, they failed to notice that the Internet was draining them of their willpower, their readiness to confront the world in real life, to meet other people in the real world, which was also connected with the regression of physical functionality, entering into behavioral addictions, and the disappearance of socialization.

 

During the pandemic, a large proportion (29.22%) of young people were able to cope with their emotions. This is evidenced by similar-sized answers in which respondents indicate that "they have no reason to grieve" (27.75%) and "I talk a lot with my loved ones, I have support in them, nothing bad happens" (21.39%). Reinforcing for Reactive Closure Syndrome are those responses that report that respondents "contact other people less often on their own initiative" (28.65%) or state that they "don't care about anything" (27.87%). Adolescents perceive themselves as more nervous, argumentative, taciturn, feeling the need to talk to others, but unable to break down blocks that impede communication with others. All of these elements combine to define Reactive Closure Syndrome, which (according to this research) can affect 30% of youth.

 

Nearly ¼ of the students had to deal with the difficulties of remote learning on their own: "Nobody helped me. I had to deal with remote learning by myself." Among those responding in this way were students growing up with a single parent who could not work remotely, or with two e-excluded parents, or staying in homes with various educational and social dysfunctions, where the time of the pandemic only accentuated this. Besides, these are also students who themselves have "limited" contact with anyone who could be helpful, as they have never expected or benefited from such help, having always been/are themselves connected to their studies ("it's my business").

 

Our research also examined in detail the correlations between hardware problems, which occurred in one in four homes in Poland during the pandemic, the dependence of "hardware problems" on the number of siblings, the sense of "loss"/absence of this sense in young people depending on hardware problems, changes in declarations of social media use (e.g. 64% more frequent and significantly more frequent users among 13-year-olds and 49% among 19-year-olds), the impact of social media consumption on relationships with peers, the relationship between social media consumption and awareness of ways to protect one's health and well-being in a pandemic, social media consumption and perceptions of peers, giving help to peers, and finally youth religiosity and spirituality, among many other spaces, relationships, and relations.

The time of remote learning was a "test" for the entire school community, both students and teachers, as well as parents. When asked who was most helpful during the remote learning time, the most indications were mother (50.64%), father (30.32), and siblings (26.96%). These results are significant in that they emphasize the primacy of family collaboration, cooperation in a situation that was new to families as remote learning reorganized their lives. The sum of the indications from the quantitative survey regarding peer support (siblings - 26.96% and boyfriend/girlfriend; partner/partner - 20.93%) is 47.89%. This is an incredibly important result as it indicates the potential that lies within peer relationships. It is important to recognize that they have survived the fire test of remote learning and the need for solidarity and cooperation with peers in the situation.

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