Investigating Life Conditions and Social Relations Before, During and After the Confinement – VICO

Beyond the many victims of the pandemic, all citizens may have been affected in their daily lives, and are likely to be affected in the long term, by the economic and social consequences of the Covid-19 health crisis. Everyone has been confined (except for some particular professions), but certainly not in the same way: containment has revealed not only inequalities in relation to illness and social ties, but also in relation to housing and work. Similarly, the denial of liberty (and in particular freedom of movement and assembly) during confinement did not apply to everyone in the same way. Did it only update the social inequalities that already existed under normal circumstances? Did it exacerbate them? Did it introduce new ones? In terms of social relations, which ones have become stronger, weaker or worse? How did French people stand loneliness or, on the contrary, cohabitation in confinement? Research on social networks has shown that personal relationships are crucial resources, just as material resources, and that they function as a “social capital” that can be mobilized throughout the life course. What impact in the short, medium and longer term will the Covid-19 crisis have on our personal networks, on our relationships with our relatives, friends, neighbors and colleagues?
To answer these questions, there is a major challenge in developing large-scale research that will make it possible to precisely measure the effects, over time, of this crisis on the living and working conditions of the French, on the ways in which they live and move around, and on the forms of sociability and solidarity that are at the basis of social cohesion. With this in mind, the VICO project aims to conduct a broad longitudinal survey. The distinctive feature of this survey: it is based on a large sample of the ordinary population having experienced confinement in France in the spring of 2020; it will consist in several successive waves during which the members of the panel will be interviewed three times over a period of 15 months in total; and it will combine quantitative and qualitative approaches.
In the urgency to collect solid scientific data during the event, but also with the opportunity to understand what is changing in our social life in times of crisis, a first group of researchers in sociology and social sciences has already teamed up to design, carry out and disseminate the first wave of this original longitudinal survey. The survey, based on an online questionnaire distributed during containment, received more than 16,000 responses. The objective of the VICO project is thus to add: 1. an additional wave of interview surveys, which are essential to seize the subjective experiences, representations and transformations of the respondents' values; and 2. a second wave of questionnaire survey 12 months after the first, i.e. one year after the confinement, to measure the sustainability of the social dynamics observed during this exceptional crisis.
The overall goal of the project is to analyse the social consequences of the health crisis over time, in order to determine whether the changes were just transitory, or eventually prove more persistent. The financial, material and human resources requested in this ANR project will sustain the analyses of the data from the first wave of the survey, and the implementation of the quantitative and qualitative surveys of the two following waves.