Solidarity in times of a pandemic: What do people do, and why? A European comparative and longitudinal study (SolPan)

The COVID-19 pandemic poses unprecedented challenges for policymakers, public health officials, and societies. The social and economic effects are likely to be felt for years to come. This situation calls for an examination of how people react to policy measures that have been introduced, and what actions they take on their own initiative over and above the official advice by governments. What motivates people to follow, or ignore, the advice of public authorities? What, or who, do people trust in these uncertain times? Can we identify policy measures, or approaches, that are more or less successful in motivating people to follow them?

We plan to examine these important questions comprising of qualitative research methods (online interviews) within an international research consortium (host: Vienna University). The project benefits from a comparative and rigorous methodological approach that will give insights on pandemic response in six countries, the United Kingdom (UK), Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy (with potentially other EU countries being added later in the process). Using a qualitative research design, we will explore what advice people follow or ignore, and why, in selected EU countries. We will also seek to identify actions that diverge from, and in some cases go above and beyond, official government advice as we expect to hear about a range of examples of how individuals protect themselves and support others in these testing times. The comparative focus of our study will yield particularly revealing insights as we can map people’s behaviours against different crisis management strategies that the UK, Austrian, German, Belgian, Dutch and Italian governments, for example, have taken.