Edited by: Changiz Mohiyeddini, Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine, United States
Reviewed by: Rubina Hanif, Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan; Anna Maria Meneghini, University of Verona, Italy
This article was submitted to Health Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
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This study investigated how young Italian people experienced the period of peak spread of COVID-19 in their country by probing their emotions, thoughts, events, and actions related to interpersonal and community bonds. This approach to the pandemic will highlight social dimensions that characterized contextual interactions from the specific perspective of Community Psychology. The aim was to investigate young people's experiences because they are the most fragile group due to their difficulty staying home and apart from their peers and because they are, at the same time, the most potentially dangerous people due to their urge to gather in groups. The research involved 568 university students, 475 females, and 93 males, with an average age of 21.82 years (SD = 4.836). The collected data were analyzed with the Grounded Theory Methodology, using the Atlas 8.0 software. From the textual data, representative codes were defined and grouped into 10 categories, which reflect the individuals' prosocial attitudes, behaviors, and values. These categories formed three macro-categories, called: “Collective Dimensions,” which includes Connectedness, Solidarity, Italian-ness, Social Problems, and Collective Mourning; “Prosocial Orientation,” which includes Trust and Hope; and “Collective Values,” which includes Values of Freedom, Respect of Social Rules, and Civic-Mindedness. All these macro-categories are indicative of the shared feelings experienced by Italians during the first time of the pandemic. Further practical implications of these results will be discussed, including a consideration of the risk of developing distress and improving well-being, as well as promoting preventive behaviors.
This article will examine the perceived burden of the Covid-19 lockdown on the lives of young people from the specific perspective of Community Psychology.
Lewin (
We examined the COVID-19 lockdown considering individual emotions and thoughts as well as actions and significant events of individual life. In our model, we aimed to detect perceptions and representations of individuals in all their emotional and cognitive dimensions as well as the events which influence their experience, together with—for them—significant actions and behaviors (Arcidiacono,
Lewin stated that “groups come into being not only because of perceived similarity, but because members realize their fates depend on the fate of the group as a whole” (Lewin,
A community is characterized by the presence of some collective dimensions such as emotional connectedness and solidarity, trust, and civic values, and these assume different meanings as circumstances change. It is worth mentioning that Walker (
In times of crisis and social trauma such as Covid-19, individuals and families change their relationship with the social world and the community.
The journal
The awareness, fostered by fear (Pulcini,
Recent research showed that sense of community is central to a program of protecting citizens' well-being during pandemic conditions (Lie et al.,
The dimensions of the collective refer to the sense of community (SoC) defined as that “feeling that the members feel they belong, to be important to each other and to the group, a shared trust that the needs of the members can be satisfied through commitment to be all together” (McMillan and Chavis,
The four fundamental elements that make up the sense of community are evident in this definition. The first element is the sense of belonging, which refers to a feeling of being part of a community and to the experience of emotional security that derives from this. A second concept involving the sense of belonging is identification with the community, that is, the experience of feeling adequate and well-integrated into it. Finally, the sense of belonging includes the sharing of a system of symbols, which has the main purpose of initially creating and then maintaining the sense of community.
The second element that makes up the sense of community is influence: it is a two-way concept as it is understood both as influence of the community on members and vice versa.
The third fundamental element is the integration and satisfaction of needs, that is, the members' certainty that their needs will be met thanks to belonging to the group since within it there is a sharing of the needs themselves as well as of purposes, beliefs, and values.
Studies have shown that the psychological sense of community is an important component in community initiatives. It is positively related to higher levels of well-being and associated with pro-social behaviors, civic participation, and promotion of social capital (Chavis and Wandersman,
In other words, community members who join together will have better chances of satisfying both their personal and their collective needs. The fourth and final element is a shared emotional connection, that is, the presence of strong emotional bonds between the members.
Coexistence is therefore favored by the sense of community that is configured as a catalyst for active, shared, and visible social participation in the entire community of belonging (Chavis and Wandersman,
Literature has effectively confirmed that SoC is associated with community participation (Florin and Wandersman,
In a pandemic situation, social trust and institutional trust are very important issues for overcoming the crisis, as literature has widely demonstrated. Indeed, trust assumes a central role in the acceptance of recommended measures (Paek et al.,
Several studies have examined the role of trust during the H1N1 influenza, highlighting the importance of building public trust for promoting compliance with recommended behaviors (Gilles et al.,
Conversely, in Italy, Stanzani (
This is to say that institutional trust (Lewis and Weigert,
Moreover, Rönnerstrand (
Finally, generalized social trust refers to trust toward generalized others who are not directly known (Bjørnskov,
Furthermore, a recent study (Imai,
During a pandemic, the sharing of values has a strong impact on social shared identities.
Social values play an important role in addressing the pandemic emergency (Jarynowski et al.,
Specifically, Flanagan (
Giving voice to people and allowing people to express their needs and desires as well as acquiring awareness about their world are among the most significant goals of community psychology (Rappaport,
Thus, at the onset of COVID-19, we decided to explore these dimensions in a group of Italian students. Specifically, we were interested in probing the inner world of young people faced with this unexpected event.
In line with the discipline's vision regarding individual well-being, we investigated how people express these dimensions.
The main goal of this study was to acquire information about the lockdown experience during the pandemic and to understand its meaning and symbolization at individual, local, and national levels.
Framed within the community psychology approach, our interest was to analyze social interactions between individual and social levels during this time. Therefore, we asked our participants to talk freely about emotions, thoughts, events, and actions that they considered significant to share. They were asked to refer to their own personal experience or to feelings and actions related to their relatives, friends, or more generally attributed to this global pandemic.
The aim was to investigate young people's experience because they are the most fragile group due to their difficulty staying home and apart from their peers and because they are, at the same time, the most potentially dangerous people due to their urge to gather in groups. Therefore, storytelling was used as a tool to collect their stories and to probe their meaning and symbolization, developing their reflectivity (Esposito et al.,
Two companion papers will carefully describe their online teaching experience (Novara et al., forthcoming) and their individual feelings and thoughts (Marzana et al., forthcoming; Migliorini et al.,
Here our aim is to probe emotional connectedness and shared actions undertaken by people during the lockdown.
The recruitment of the participants took place through the mediation of lecturers in the field of community psychology at five universities in different Italian regions in the north, center, and south. Each instructor invited the students in their own course to participate in the research, filling out an online questionnaire created and distributed through the SurveyMonkey digital platform.
Data collection took place from March 24 to April 1, 2020, i.e., during the week in which the number of cases of COVID-19 contagion reached its peak in Italy.
Participants consisted of 568 university students, 475 females and 93 males, with an average age of 21.82 years (SD = 4.836). For all participant characteristics, see
Characteristics of the participants.
Male | 16.4 | 93 |
Female | 83.6 | 475 |
North | 28.0 | 159 |
Center | 10.7 | 61 |
South | 61.3 | 348 |
Heterosexual | 91.0 | 517 |
Homosexual | 3.0 | 17 |
Bisexual | 5.3 | 30 |
Other sexual orientation | 0.7 | 4 |
With one or both parents | 85.0 | 483 |
Alone | 2.8 | 16 |
With a partner | 4.4 | 25 |
With one or more roommates | 3.3 | 19 |
With other family members | 4.4 | 25 |
University of Valle d'Aosta | 11.4 | 65 |
Università Cattolica del Sacro CCuore Milan | 17.3 | 98 |
University of Florence | 9.9 | 56 |
University of Naples Federico II | 51.6 | 293 |
University of Palermo | 9.2 | 52 |
Other Italian universities | 0.7 | 4 |
Students were asked to describe meaningful events and actions related to their lockdown experience. In a sort of focalized approach (Arcidiacono,
When filling in the form on the SurveyMonkey platform, students were asked to provide informed consent.
Those students were also offered the opportunity to receive individual actions to express social support and the take care of their own student community.
The textual material written on the online platform was analyzed by means of the Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) (Corbin and Strauss,
The process of data analysis starts after the first texts provided were analyzed. The aim was for the entire research team to share common meanings to be attributed to the written material. The preliminary coding phase started with a bottom-up approach by coding significant words and sentences. They were then shaped into larger code groups and framed in wider categories.
Several online meetings took place, usually with the participation of 10–17 researchers. A reflexivity-based iterative process was undertaken among all team members. Notes, theoretical memos, and preliminary codes for identifying conceptual categories that shared common meanings were discussed. A reflective procedure (Esposito et al.,
A preliminary discussion on the collected texts was shared with the students during the course of the study. The preliminary results were also shared with groups of students not directly involved in the research during seminars to which the researcher's team was invited.
A brief report will be provided to all students involved in the research, highlighting the principal results as well as all references to published articles through docent websites and/or Facebook pages.
The results showed the presence of some sensitizing concepts in the student's storytelling (Blumer,
The texts were then categorized into collective dimensions such as connectedness, solidarity, social problems, and collective mourning, but the coding also encompassed some specific unexpected thoughts concerning national belonging that were named “Italian-ness” (
Categories and macrocategories.
The
Connectedness. A peculiar aspect—consistent with a situation characterized by “
Other interviewees refer to aspects related to everyday life, such as sharing useful information or exchanging recipes, because cooking was one of the favorite pastimes during the lockdown, with the sense both of expressing one's creativity and of enriching the new ritual of enjoying meals together, at the same table.
In addition, other shared suggestions concerned exercise and workouts due to the discomfort caused by the forced inactivity and the lack of movement perceived particularly in the first days of confinement, and, above all, the most important topic is the sharing of emotions: fear, worry, and uncertainty about the future.
Participants thus wrote about connectedness. They wrote about their own perceptions related to micro- and macro-belonging, and, consequently, about the cohesion experienced in their proximal networks such as their neighborhood, partner, and family: “
Singing and playing popular songs and hymns on balconies, toasting one another from one side of the street to the other as well as playing traditional bingo (
At the community level, it is then interesting to note the importance attributed to the
Solidarity. A possible outcome of such feelings was the growth of solidarity: “
Interviewees referred to community solidarity: even if at times it did not involve all the residents, these feelings were widely shared anyway. Solidarity was often defined as “
Particular attention was paid to healthcare workers and professionals: participants highlighted both the solidarity shown by them toward the whole local community and the inhabitants' appreciation for their work as “
In addition, similar praise was expressed toward volunteers engaged in providing meals or other basic necessities, or individual protection devices, often lacking in the first phase of lockdown.
Another aspect—emerging with particular emphasis in some contexts—must be underscored: this refers to international solidarity, demonstrated by physicians coming from abroad to help the areas of Italy most seriously affected by the virus or by providing medical devices and financial support. People—and particularly some young people—generally think about other countries as producers of goods or places worth visiting and not as possible helpers.
In “normal” life participants seem to have considered solidarity as a dimension coming from lucky (healthy, medium-high income, and privileged) people toward the most deprived individuals. During the lockdown they experienced the meaning of loss and lack of resources, rediscovering peer-to-peer solidarity.
Italian-ness. The social relationships we experience in daily life also satisfy the need to feel like full members of a community that is territorially recognized and confined in a specific physical and mental space. This feeling of being Italian, and being recognized by others as such, is what we called “Italian-ness.” It includes those anthropological, cultural, and territorial characteristics that connote being Italian. It is not only a question of characters that are objectively unique to a nation, such as a symbol, a geographical border, or a founding myth; a fundamental aspect is, in fact, the common feeling which is that of being part of something bigger and more important that is independent of individual stances and, at the same time, includes them (Reicher and Hopkin,
What emerges from the research is that the pandemic connected people to the nation—and to some extent to the populace—in a renewed feeling of Italian-ness. Among the symbols, the “tricolor flag” displayed at windows and the “Italian national anthem” sung in unison from the balconies of the houses, or other songs grounded in national memory, all recurred in the texts.
Even the posters displayed on the facades of the houses, with the words “everything will be alright,” had a consoling if not proactive effect. These were the actions through which the population felt less alone or rather, less isolated (probably also from the world) and “closer to all Italian citizens, as never before.”
As one participant wrote: “People who get excited and sing with you in a moment of collective pain can generate reflected joy,” a collective action that outlines an action of “national coping.”
In summary, the pandemic bonded people to the nation in a renewed feeling of “Italian-ness,” highlighting how “in an emergency there are no borders.”
Social Problems. From the social perspective, the description of the problems seems to generate a certain polarity. In some cases, an intrinsically social and collective vision of the problem prevailed: “
On the other hand, there were many expressions of identification with others, where social concern focused on the individual suffering of the other; therefore, the summative character of the sufferings of the individual emerges as social. In this regard, the texts collected presented a great deal of narrative expressing attention to social problems: “
The variety and intensity of this meaning can also be encapsulated entirely within this single statement: “
Collective Mourning. The Social Mourning dimension seems above all to emphasize the emergence of the community meaning of death, as opposed to the contemporary tendency to consider death as a private event and mourning as a personal elaboration. What is represented in participants' texts, therefore, is not only a fact in itself, but above all the novelty, the surprise, the difference compared to usual living conditions.
In this sense, some aspects appear to be significant. One of these is the frequency with which participants speak about the death of strangers. Fortunately, this is also probably related to a low incidence of family mourning, but the recurrence of this theme underlines the impact at a community level including for the many people not directly involved: “…
An interesting feature of these statements is that, although they are about strangers, the categories of meaning and the discursive styles of the private dimension of mourning and personal pain are mainly used, as if attuning to the families of the deceased strangers. In the discourse, there is therefore a point of contact between the collective entity of events and the affective and family sphere for the attribution of meaning: “…
Another element that seems to refer to the community dimension of mourning is the frequency with which the images of the coffins and the line of military vehicles in Bergamo are recalled in the various cities, even distant ones. This refers to a visual representation of experiences conveyed by the mass media. However, this aspect can also be taken for a better definition of the experiences of mourning, because sometimes addressing loss appears in the private dimension, linked to the direct experience of the participants: “
Finally, in some cases, the speed of contagion transmission number was associated with the Social Mourning macro-category. This occurrence may suggest the profound impression aroused not only by the extent of the losses, but above all by the occurrence, a rampant emergency, coming so fast as to cause anxiety with respect to our practical possibility to combat it.
Collective values. The
This refers to an attitude of focusing on oneself and one's needs while ignoring those of others: “
Some examples of these behaviors are escaping lockdown by train to return home, moving from the so-called “red zones” of Italy, which were considered highly contagious, and irresponsible shopping in supermarket to get as many items as possible. “
An important value on which the interviewees focused was freedom. During this period of lockdown, this assumed the connotation of “
Last, particular attention was paid to the dimension of the environment. Many participants wondered about the effect that the pandemic would have on nature, often speaking of “
The
Trust in fellow citizens is basically considered as very important for empowering everybody to adopt precautionary behaviors to protect themselves and other people: “
Moreover, the students refer to an increased confidence in public institutions, above all in the Prime Minister, thanks to the closeness and understanding that the institutions showed toward the citizens: “
Great confidence and recognition were expressed for the Italian lockdown model since it displayed an emphasis on care: “
Trust in the authorities also increased gratitude for the presence of checks on compliance with the lockdown: “
However, there is a portion of the students who show distrust toward fellow citizens and authorities regarding the management of the emergency. The distrust is mainly toward careless attitudes adopted by other inhabitants and institutions: “
For some of the interviewees, a symbol of hope is represented by the drawings that Italian children made, recognized as symbols of positivity toward the future; children's drawings were also represented as a trigger for serenity, relieving the worries and sadness of the lockdown period.
The saying “
The
Hope, however, carries different attributes for the interviewees. Some of the interviewees hope for a revolution compared with what existed before the onset of COVID-19, that is, the possibility of adopting new and different ways of living in the future. Thus, hope for the revolution means importing new ways of establishing interpersonal relationships, taking care of the most vulnerable, having greater care for the environment: “
For some youth, hope will return when they can resume living as in prior everyday life, before the COVID-19 emergency: “
Then some of the interviewees refer to the lack of hope as the inability to imagine themselves in the future. Inability to foresee when the emergency will end makes the interviewees afraid and discouraged.
The coffins left behind in the Bergamo morgue continuously broadcast by media for several days was the image also reported by the frequent dreams (Iorio et al.,
According to Walker (
Confirming what was reported in the introduction, in the words of the participants, the renewed desire for bonding and community was evident in response to the situation of collective trauma (Ntontis and Rocha,
We have also found this renewed interest in bonds in what we could define as behavioral solidarity toward humanity. In particular, it places the most isolated social categories (such as the elderly, the homeless, etc.) or professional categories less valued by government policies (i.e., doctors, nurses, and the whole health system) at the center of attention and collective sensitivity.
We also found that the epidemic led individual citizens to have a shared emotional experience and to develop a social identity that we have called Italian-ness. In fact, in line with the Intergroup Emotions Theory (Smith and Mackie,
This identity was also strengthened by the fact that Italy was at that time the only European country to be severely affected by the epidemic. In fact, during the period in which the data were collected, there was an image, fueled by fear and by social media, of Italians as spreaders of the virus. As postulated again by the Intergroup Emotions Theory (Smith and Mackie,
In addition, as Dovidio et al. (
Moreover, in line with literature (Rönnerstrand,
Finally, it is interesting to note the feeling of hope (Solnit,
Indeed, hope, despite being little explored in its implications in a pandemic situation, is a very important issue, moreover considering it as a socially constructed emotion connected to the quality of life (Scioli,
This was probably also the benefit of the storytelling method that we used in the research: It allowed the interviewees not only to report their experiences but to narrate them in the psychological sense, accessing an emotional and meaningful elaboration of their experiences, and we know how much this can promote preventive and caring behavior during mass emergencies.
Finally, this study confirms that young people are attentive and sensitive to social issues, as elsewhere described (Alfieri et al.,
This research is not without limits. This study collected experiences of students, and in the classes we included, there was a greater number of females. The number of participants also differs among various universities, but it is quite balanced among the northern, southern, and central regions of Italy. Furthermore, the participants are university students studying in humanities departments; therefore, the sample does not represent all Italian university students and young Italians, more broadly.
In a future study, it would be interesting to develop situated differences among young Italians of different social contexts and to compare the results with youth from other countries facing the pandemic with different strategies.
This study reveals the initial emotions, thoughts, and actions undertaken at a collective level by students of the North, South, and Center of Italy. Its value is to grasp the primary reaction to the lockdown emergency. It highlights how around Italy, people undertook actions aimed at maintaining continuity among people and overcoming the forced closure of society. For us, as community psychologists, this need for connectedness expresses how community interactions are the pillar of social life.
In this vein, Italian-ness may be understood as a form of shared national identity that makes possible a common identity. Furthermore, the many references to the whole world and environmental needs demonstrate a wider social identification with our planet and all human beings.
Referring to the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) of crowd behavior developed by Cocking et al. (
Similarly, solidarity occupied a significant place in collective descriptions of our respondents: “Evidence from a range of different disasters in different countries (Drury et al.,
Narratives coming from the data collected show communities at first astonished and then frightened by the persistence of the contagion. Suddenly, disease and death pervaded everyday life. The psychosocial and collective response, in order to restore an acceptable threshold of well-being—according to Nelson and Prilleltensky (
The complexity and depth of these data show the potentiality of storytelling as a tool that offered the students the opportunity to re-think and reprocess traumatic events, a space to rework them. It has proved to be a tool that not only has value in itself but also for the effects it had. Storytelling helped the young people build a meaning into their experiences, to elaborate fears but also to give voice and creative expression to those experiences. Storytelling empowered young people and was a powerful way to improve their overall wellbeing.
From a community psychology perspective, in line with the COVID-19 Statement of EFPA ECPA,
Therefore, it is to be hoped that these preliminary considerations on the COVID-19 lockdown experience will reach a larger audience and therefore become a lever for social change as the special issue proposed by Castelnuovo et al. (
The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.
The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by University Federico II, Department of Humanities, Ethics Board for Research in Psychology. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The reviewer AMM declared a past co-authorship with one of the authors EM to the handling Editor.