Herbig, L., Wagoner, B., Watzlawik, M., Jensen, E., Lorenz, L. & Pfleger, A. (2021). Trajectories of Experience through the Pandemic: A Qualitative Longitudinal Dataset. Frontiers in Political Science, 4:791494. DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2022.791494
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a radical rupture into the lives of people around the world. Overnight society slowed to a standstill, strict rules were put in place and people had to adapt to a new set of norms and practices to curb the spread of the virus. In this way, the pandemic has been a naturally occurring experiment on the public’s responses to rapid societal changes, bringing earlier niche topics such as trust, compliance, vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy theories to the forefront of both public and scientific discussion. How did people experience, understand and react to these rapid changes?
In this article, we describe a dataset of longitudinal semi-structured interviews collected in Germany between December 2020 and September 2021 that sheds light on this question. This dataset was created as part of the Viral Communication project (viralcomm.info), which has investigated public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany including people’s changing perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. It complements and deepens the explosion of research that has emerged on how societies organized themselves in the wake of the pandemic.
