Social representations of COVID-19 vaccines: Exploration of user-generated comments via online video sharing during the first year of the pandemic

The current study aimed to explore the public understanding of COVID-19 vaccines and the social representations emerging from a corpus of user-generated comments on YouTube videos posted during the year following the World Health Organization's declaration of the novel coronavirus as pandemic. We used Structural Topic Modelling to process the text and identified a 10-topic solution as the best to represent the corpus of text data. The exploration of the topics showed a complex landscape of social representations underlying a plurality of perspectives, which we interpreted as reflecting different users' needs to make sense of the unprecedented events. Implications for theory, future research, and intervention for health psychology and policy are discussed. © The Author(s) 2023.

Covid-19 as an “invisible other” and socio-spatial distancing within a one-metre individual bubble

Inspired by the social representation theory, the article embraces many aspects of the way in which the space dimension in social distancing has become a central measure for both one’s own and others’ health protection during the Covid-19 pandemic, evoking symbolic dimensions related to the social representations of “others” that are emotionally driven by fear or mirror the vulnerable self, activating the othering–otherness process. This invisible (sometimes stigmatized) “other”—never previously known—has in a few months infected more than 11 million people on the global scale and caused more than 500 thousands deaths (as of 30 June 2020: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/). It has dictated where we can go, whether and how we can work, and whom we can meet, induced the virtualization of social relationships (“neighbours from afar” and “together but divided”), and confined working and socio-recreational activities to the home. The socio-spatial prescriptive distancing assumes various meanings in cultural contexts depending on whether lifestyles are more collectivist or individualistic and whether social practices are marked by crowded social proximity or distance. The social representations of cities as complex systems of “places” conceived for social “coexistence” have moved to prescriptive rules of inter-individual spaces (1 m, 2 m, and even more) for “survival”, with significant effects on place identity. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited part of Springer Nature.

The "Invisible Other": Social Representations of COVID-19 Pandemic in Media and Institutional Discourse

This paper thematizes issues of "otherness" in the representations of the COVID-19 pandemic in the media and institutional discourses. The emergence of unknown infectious disease represents a threatening event, intensively discussed in public and private communication. The pandemic crisis spread from China on a global scale and refocused the media agenda, transferring citizens' attention from immigration to health risk, superseding the racially connoted immigrant with an "invisible other". At first, Italian citizens were exposed to an institutional communication aimed at reassuring the population: "no more than a flu". Once the pandemic emerged as a public concern, alarm was used as a prevention strategy, legitimated by the recommendations of scientists: awareness stage. Successively, communication entered the divergence stage: multiple discourses emerged, both across scientists and politicians, and between lay people and experts, increasing uncertainty about the situation anchored into dilemma of health versus economic priority. Conjointly, representations of the disease offered in public discourses appealed to lay belief patterns: coronavirus was explained as result of either the unhygienic contiguity of the Chinese people to animals, or the interests of hidden powerful groups pursuing their goals (e.g., the conspiracy theories concerning 5G or lab-based viral weapon). Notwithstanding, the invisible infectious disease also increased awareness of human vulnerability on a global scale, engendering concurrent representations of otherness, which refer to humankind as the common ingroup. This process - contrary to the "othering" occurring in the projection of the disease cause onto devalued outgroups - implies the assumption that the "other may be me/us".