Following recent sociological diagnoses, it is continuing change (Rosa, 2014), global risks, and a reflexive interaction of uncertainties and opportunities (Beck, 2009; Giddens, 1994) that shape today’s societies. Some scholars suggest that people differ in their capabilities of responding to these challenges depending on their social background, for instance in their reflexive “identity capital” (Kraus, 2015) and their “reflexive habitus” (Archer, 2012).

Like under a burning glass, these societal diagnoses are even more visible in the enduring COVID-19 pandemic and seem to come with now unforeseeable implications not only for adults but also for children.

Importantly, a child encounters many ambiguous situations during childhood development in which conflicts arise between what the child knows about the world so far and what happens in reality (Brice, 1985). The child usually resolves these inner conflicts by changing their concepts of reality. Does this apply also to the present societal crisis?

Following Bronfenbrenner’s (1978) socio-ecological model, children as they grow up occupy one layer of social environment after the other on the micro level, starting with parents and the core family. The outer macro level includes “economic, social, educational, legal, and political systems” (ibid., p. 6f.) and frames an individual`s relations on other levels of the model. This is confirmed by results of a study with young people in the US and Europe, showing changes in 18- to 25-year-olds’ trust in public institutions and governments following the financial crisis (Schoon & Mortimer, 2017). However, do macro level changes equally affect all youth and children? Margaret Archer’s research on “reflexive habitus” (Archer, 2012; see also Sweetman, 2003) as an individual’s capabilities to deal with complexity and uncertainties, suggests that individual’s differ in these capabilities depending on their social background.

Besides children’s reflexive habitus, the type(s) of children’s trust—in how far they trust people in their direct social environment or people they have no personal relations with (van Hoorn, 2014; see also "trust in strangers" in Weigert, 2011)—might be another important resource of resilience in the pandemic. Importantly, social trust seems to be rather context specific (Möllering, 2006) and especially dynamic in adolescent age (Abdelzadeh & Lundberg, 2017).

Recent research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children targeted for instance parenting styles and school children’s well-being (Neubauer, Schmidt, Kramer, & Schmiedek, 2021), the care work distribution between mothers and fathers of different socio-economic backgrounds (Möhring et al., 2020), and the perspective of parents on their children’s well-being during severe contact-distancing measures (Langmeyer, Guglhör-Rudan, Naab, Urlen, & Winklhofer, 2020).

However, research on youth’s and children’s own perspectives is scarce. The JuKo-studies 1 and 2 (data collection in May and November 2020 respectively) examined youth’s (minimum age: 15 years) experiences during the pandemic in Germany. While participants reported a feeling of disempowerment in JuKo 1 (Andresen et al., 2020), results showed a strong quest for political involvement into decisions in the consecutive JuKo 2 study (Andresen et al., 2020).

To the knowledge of the authors, the specific perspectives of younger children from different social backgrounds towards the pandemic remain unknown. This creates the relevant research gap for the present study as part of a cumulative dissertation, and leads to the research questions:

RQ 1: How do 7- to 9-year-old children describe their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic?

RQ 2: What is the role of children’s particularized trust in persons, groups or institutions (micro level) during the pandemic?

RQ 3: Do children experience generalized trust into unknown people (“trust in strangers”) during the pandemic?

RQ 4: Do results of research question 1-3 indicate differences according to children’s social background?

Due to its focus on children’s views the study follows the childhood research tradition (Krüger, 2016). Facing the lack of research on children’s views during the pandemic, the study furthermore follows a qualitative approach with the intention to explore the field (Kelle, 2019). Qualitative semi-structured interviews will be conducted with 14 seven to nine year old children in Germany. We will recruit children from two groups, depending on their socioeconomically privileged or disadvantaged family background (national "risk of poverty" threshold; Huinink, 2019). To this end, one parent will be asked to fill in a background questionnaire asking them about the household income and each parents’ educational attainment and job situation. The questionnaire also includes questions on the child’s living situation, such as the size of the living space and the number of siblings. Participatory research methods (von Unger, 2014) can be a helpful introduction into interviews, especially with children (Ford & Campbell, 2018). Therefore, families will receive a playful task prior to the interview. It asks the child and one parent to create a map of one typical day in the child’s life with paper and pencil, and to take photos of particularly important places for the child (e.g. places the child likes to be at when they are happy or sad) inside and outside the living space. The map and the photos are made available for us online. Due to the enduring severe contact-distancing measures in Germany, we will conduct interviews online with children being at home and accompanied by one parent for the entry phase. The semi-structured interview includes questions about the photos of important places, the maps of a typical day, and the pandemic related specifics in it. Further questions target children’s experiences during the contact-minimizing measures, the persons to whom they relate to in daily life, and about their assumptions of other people’s views on the pandemic situation. The detailed interview manual is presently investigated for approval by the ethics commission of the department for education and psychology at Freie Universität Berlin. Data collection will take place in the German federate states of Brandenburg and Berlin during the first five months of 2021. We will conduct qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz, 2017) of the interview transcripts including links to the participatory artefacts (map and photos). We will present and discuss preliminary results at ERC.

The present research is targeting children´s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we investigate children’s everyday life—with a special focus on time-periods of severe contact-minimizing measures—and their social trust in different individuals and social groups. We expect to gain insight into children’s concepts of the COVID-19 pandemic and their everyday lives in it (research question 1), which we assume to differ due to the social background of children’s families (research question 4). Furthermore, we anticipate children to have a certain (small) network of the most important reference people around them, including family members, friends and teachers whom they especially address in emotionally challenging moments. We expect children to report media use for regular contact with others, except for family members in the household (research questions 2). Furthermore, we expect children to have a certain view of “other people” and their behaviour during the pandemic, and assume that children will show a corresponding tendency (not) to trust “other people” in this context (research question 3). We hope to gain indication on whether children from different social backgrounds differ in their trust relations during the pandemic, having no justified pre-assumptions (research questions 4). With the results of this study, we hope to contribute to the development of theories about children’s coping capacities (focussing on social trust) in face of severe societal crises in consideration of children’s different social backgrounds. Furthermore, we will discuss the practical application of the research findings in terms of measures that reduce negative impacts of the pandemic for children—especially for those from less privileged families. Last not least, we hope to find starting points for future comparative research on children’s perceptions of global crises depending on their country of origin or the country specific measures to weaken negative impacts of the respective crisis respectively.

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