Qualitative Study of Families' Pandemic Coping

Beginning in June 2020, we participated in an International Consortium encompassing research teams from ten countries with a wide range of socioeconomic and cultural realities. The project constituted a comparative cross-country enterprise to investigate how people in diverse contexts understood and responded to government guidelines around the COVID-19 pandemic and what impact these measures had on family life and individual subjectivities. Our team in Chile brought researchers from different disciplines in the social sciences1. We designed a qualitative longitudinal study to explore how families and family members coped with the challenges posed by COVID-19 during the most critical months of the pandemic. From September 2020 to January 2021, we followed 38 families2 and gathered information on how lockdowns and other health and safety measures impacted their everyday life and how their family and personal relationships changed during this period.
We implemented adaptive strategies to address some of the most pressing challenges of conducting qualitative research during the pandemic (Table 1). For selecting participants, we used a purposive sampling of families that could constitute information-rich cases to study changes in everyday life during the pandemic (Palinkas et al. 2015 (link)). Families had to have at least one school-age child and reside permanently in one of the regions covered by the study. We also ensured that selected cases represented a range of socioeconomic backgrounds—including households of lower-middle, middle, and upper-middle income3—and family structures—including families from nuclear, extended, and single-parent households. The recruitment of participants worked through decentralized research teams based in six universities in northern, central, and southern Chile4. Each team had local knowledge of their regions and vast experience conducting fieldwork in their communities. We contacted gatekeepers, people who belonged to the selected regions and had deep connections with their communities and neighborhoods, to establish contact with local families. Research assistants helped to verify that families met the selection criteria and maintained regular contact with family members throughout the project by phone and the Indeemo app.
Table 1

Methodological Challenges and Adaptive Strategies

Challenges	Adaptive Strategies
Contact with participants	Working through decentralized research teams with local knowledge, fieldwork experience in communities, and research assistants acting as gatekeepers.
Gaining access to the field	Adopting a multi-method approach and different techniques to gather data and continuously monitor families and participants.
Co-creating a field	Introducing the Indeemo mobile app as an interface for participating and submitting posts within specific tasks.
Flexible conditions for participation and fieldwork	Implement a non-intrusive approach that relies heavily on multimodal diaries tailored to the times and requirements of the participants.

The physical distancing imposed since the virus outbreak meant that all communications between researchers and participants had to be done remotely, including reading and signing informed consents5. Once a family became part of the study, a mobile phone with internet data was provided for contact and participation through the Indeemo app. We used Indeemo as a non-intrusive methodological device for recording multimodal diaries of family trajectories during the pandemic. Considering the difficulties of accessing the field and building trust and rapport with families and individuals, we deployed different techniques that allowed us to connect with people and to gather information gradually, without much intrusion into their daily lives. These techniques included a quantitative questionnaire to draw a sociodemographic profile of each family, two open-ended family interviews to get a qualitative overview of their lives during the pandemic, and one in-depth interview with heads of households to get additional insights relative to their experiences. All these techniques allowed us to build a general understanding of the field and provided contextual information about families and their backgrounds and trajectories. Data production was also adapted to the specific conditions of the participants and subject to their time and technological needs6.