When work came home: Formation of feeling rules in the context of a pandemic.

The shift of middle-class jobs to home settings, which occurred as a result of COVID-19 health measures that also closed schools and daycares, introduced dynamic changes to everyday life. We investigate these changes drawing on data from our study in which participants in Nova Scotia, Canada, who were working at home due to the pandemic, wrote journal entries in response to weekly prompts. Participants not only documented changes to their routines and challenges of managing work and parenting simultaneously and in the same physical space, but also reflected on their conflicted emotions about life during the pandemic and their vision for life as things return to "normal." Their narratives prompt us to consider these experiences and emotions in relation to Arlie Hochschild's scholarship on feeling rules, emotion work, and gender and work more broadly. We find that from our participants' struggle to meet existing expectations on activities and emotion while simultaneously managing new sets of protocols and feeling rules what emerges is a resistance to norms of busyness, productivity, and exhaustion.

Qualitative Research Studies Online: Using Prompted Weekly Journal Entries During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Solicited journal entries are a qualitative research method with a fairly strong tradition in sociological research and particularly in qualitative health research. However, the practices and strengths associated with solicited journal entries have not been explored as frequently or comprehensively as more conventional qualitative research methods, such as interviews. During the COVID-19 pandemic we carried out two online studies employing solicited written journal entries and photos. One study focused on pregnancy and health care experiences during the pandemic and the other on everyday life while working from home due to public health restrictions. Here, we discuss solicited online journal entries as a qualitative method and reflect on the strengths and challenges we encountered, including those related to using the online survey tool LimeSurvey for a qualitative diary-based study. The richness of data and the ability to solicit participants' contemporaneous reflections over the course of a set length of time, the ability to reach people across time zones and in multiple places, and the ability to adapt prompts in a quickly changing research context are major strengths of online journaling. The level of commitment required by participants, the potential for attrition, the need for literacy and technology access, and the large amount of data from each participant are potential limitations for researchers to consider.