Self-Isolation during the COVID-19 Pandemics: Everyday Discourse on a New Social Phenomenon among University Students

The COVID-19 pandemic was the first experience for the largest part of the world’s population of a new disease that spread rapidly across continents, a global threat to which unprecedented rest rictive measures were elaborated. The purpose of the st udy was to analyse the everyday discourse on self-isolation among st udent youth based on the Theory of Social Representations. The st udy was conducted in two time periods corresponding to two “waves” of the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia (“first wave”: from 18, June to 10, July, 2020, and “second wave”: from 12, October to 18, November, 2020). The sample included 275 Russian universit y st udents (9.5 % male) aged 17 to 27 years. The main tool to reveal the social representations was free associations technique. The survey was conducted in online format via Google-forms. Comparison of the struct ure and content of social representations on self-isolation as a new social phenomenon at different stages of the pandemic made it possible to reveal their emergence and dynamics among st udent youth: (1) the opposition between voluntariness and coercion was characteristic of the everyday understanding of self-isolation at the very beginning of the pandemic, and (2) psychological experiences associated with the pandemic and the self-isolation caused by it t urn out to be key further. In general, research findings show that self-isolation is understood by universit y st udents as a search for “pluses” in a sit uation of forced restrictions. © 2024, Peoples' Friendship University of Russia. All rights reserved.