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.

Citizenship in times of crisis: biosocial state-citizen relations during COVID-19 in Austria.

Drawing upon 152 in-depth qualitative interviews with residents in Austria carried out in the first year of the pandemic, this article discusses how people's experiences with COVID-19 policies reflect and reshape state-citizen relations. Coinciding with a significant government crisis, the first year of COVID-19 in Austria saw pandemic measures justified with reference to a biological, often medical understanding of health that framed disease prevention in terms of transmission reduction, often with reference to metrics such as hospitalisation rates, etc. Instead of using this biomedical frame, our interviewees, however, drew attention to biopsychosocial dimensions of the crisis and problematised the entanglements between economy and health. We call this the emergence of a biosocial notion of citizenship that is attentive to psychological, social and economic dimensions of health. Insights into the biosocial nature of pandemic citizenship open a window of opportunity for addressing long-standing social injustices.

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

The sudden and dramatic advent of the COVID-19 pandemic led to urgent demands for timely, relevant, yet rigorous research. This paper discusses the origin, design, and execution of the SolPan research commons, a large-scale, international, comparative, qualitative research project that sought to respond to the need for knowledge among researchers and policymakers in times of crisis. The form of organization as a research commons is characterized by an underlying solidaristic attitude of its members and its intrinsic organizational features in which research data and knowledge in the study is shared and jointly owned. As such, the project is peer-governed, rooted in (idealist) social values of academia, and aims at providing tools and benefits for its members. In this paper, we discuss challenges and solutions for qualitative studies that seek to operate as research commons.

Anticipating hopes, fears and expectations towards COVID-19 vaccines: A qualitative interview study in seven European countries.

Vaccine uptake is essential to managing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and vaccine hesitancy is a persistent concern. At the same time, both decision-makers and the general population have high hopes for COVID-19 vaccination. Drawing from qualitative interview data collected in October 2020 as part of the pan-European SolPan study, this study explores early and anticipatory expectations, hopes and fears regarding COVID-19 vaccination across seven European countries. We find that stances towards COVID-19 vaccines were shaped by personal lived experiences, but participants also aligned personal and communal interests in their considerations. Trust, particularly in expert institutions, was an important prerequisite for vaccine acceptance, but participants also expressed doubts about the rapid vaccine development process. Our findings emphasise the need to move beyond the study of factors driving vaccine hesitancy, and instead to focus on how people personally perceive vaccination in their particular social and political context.

The Social Meanings of Artifacts: Face Masks in the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, research has explored various aspects of face mask use. While most of the research explores their effectiveness to prevent the spread of the virus, a growing body of literature has found that using face masks also has social meaning. But what social meaning does it have, and how does this meaning express itself in people's practice? Based on 413 qualitative interviews with residents in five European countries (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, and Switzerland), we found that the meanings of face masks have changed drastically during the first months of the pandemic. While in spring 2020 people wearing them had to fear stigmatization, in autumn of 2020 not wearing masks was more likely to be stigmatized. Throughout the first year of the pandemic, we found that mask wearing had multiple and partly seemingly contradictory meanings for people. They were perceived as obstacles for non-verbal communication, but also a way to affirm friendships and maintain social contacts. They also signaled specific moral or political stances on the side of face mask wearers and non-wearers alike, expressed their belonging to certain communities, or articulated concern. In sum, our findings show how face masks serve as scripts for people to navigate their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conclude that public and political discussions concerning face masks should include not only evidence on the epidemiological and infectiological effects of face masks, but also on their social meanings and their social effects.

Understanding compliance as multi-faceted: values and practices during the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria

In some countries, far-reaching ‘lockdown’ measures to contain the spread of coronavirus were implemented early in 2020. In Austria, these early measures were met with a high degree of compliance among the country’s population. In this paper, we draw upon qualitative interviews, and ask how people made sense of the restrictions imposed during the first lockdown in April 2020 and what shaped their compliance. Empirical research has so far tried to explain compliance by means of people’s disposition and motivations as well as demographic and social characteristics. Instead of focussing on who is compliant, we aim to understand how people practice compliance. We do this by approaching compliance through the concepts of values and practice. First, our findings indicate that people assess whether measures are suitable and legitimate in relation to the values of science, the law, and morality. Second, people assign additional personal value to compliance by stressing its positive implications on their own lives. By adopting a nuanced perspective on compliance as inextricably linked to peoples’ values and practices, our paper critically contributes to the political and scholarly discussion of pandemic public health measures. Understanding compliance through the lens of values shows how people make sense of the measures in the context of their everyday lives, helping us to move away from a binary understanding of (non-)compliance that has become morally charged. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Critical Public Health is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)