Abstract
The aim of this study was to find out what interpretive repertoires young people use in the symbolic management of the pandemic. Qualitative research using several methods on a sample of 172 young people in three countries, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Austria, and the subsequent discursive analysis showed that young people symbolically coped during the Covid-19 pandemic with the help of widespread concepts such as cutting off, closing sci-fi and panic. The interpretations used by young people to symbolically deal with the pandemic are close to those present in the public discourse—the discourses of threat, loss, emotion—but there was also a search for the concepts and language for use by experts and the general public in communicating about the pandemic. There were no significant differences in the interpretations of life during the Covid-19 pandemic in the three Central European countries.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the Contract no. APVV-18-0303 and VEGA grant Psychological, sociocultural and biological sources of love, no. 1/0426/18.
References
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© 2022 Institute for Research in Social Communication, Slovak Academy of Sciences
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Articles in the same Issue
- Early literacy curriculum and its journey to kindergarten classroom
- Medium-specific aspects of digital reading and their impact on reading comprehension
- Diverstity and centrism in two contrasting early childhood education and care systems: Slovakia and Indonesia compared
- For God and for nation! The ideologisation of schools and education under the changing relationship between church and state in Slovakia
- Civil defence education: (Non)specific dangers and destabilisation of actorship in education
- The internet’s role in promoting civic engagement in China and Singapore: A Confucian view
- Designing digital tools for quality assurance in 24-hour home-care in Austria
- Coronavirus anxiety in Slovakia during the second wave of the pandemic – Associations with depression, insomnia and generalized anxiety disorder
- Symbolic coping: Young people’s perspectives during the Covid-19 pandemic in three Central European countries
- A misfortune or a benefit? Young people’s quality of life and romantic relationships during the Covid-19 pandemic
- Individual representations of love and their social and cultural resources
- The other side of the coin: A narrative inquiry into the positive consequences of infidelity among young adults