RAPID: New York Covid-19 Chronicle and Oral History Archive award

The COVID-19 pandemic is the gravest public health crisis the United States has faced since the Influenza pandemic of 1918, but it will not be the last. Disaster research is often by necessity retrospective, providing accounts of past actions and ongoing recoveries. The temporal profile of the COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity for social research in the middle of an unfolding crisis, providing contemporaneous insights into risk perception and sensemaking under duress, community and organizational resilience, transformations in social structure, and real time adaptations to severe economic and social dislocations. Concentrating on New York City, this project will create a contemporaneous record of the city’s battle with COVID-19 across the epidemic curve. New York is a critical site for understanding the course of this pandemic because it was an early epicenter of the disease in the U.S., because it has a robust municipal emergency management system with deep experience of past disasters, health-related and otherwise, and because it is home to one of the nation’s strongest urban healthcare systems. The project will provide real time findings about New York City that will be relevant to jurisdictions in earlier phases along the arc of the pandemic, thus assisting other governmental leaders in planning effective responses. This project will also rigorously document the COVID-19 emergency to better understand how it is unfolding, to better inform the recovery, and to learn lessons that will aid our fight against the next pandemic and other extreme events. These findings will be critical to leaders at all levels of government so as to promote the safety and security of U.S. residents in the years ahead.

The current COVID-19 pandemic challenges community and organizational resilience and necessitates transformations in social structure. To analyze these changes, this project combines three approaches to data gathering that capture the evolving and multi-dimensional impact of the COVID-19 crisis on New Yorkers. First, a survey of 1,000 people will track shifts in stress responses, helping behaviors, social isolation, and resilience. Demographic data gathered from the survey will inform and refine recruitment of new participants. The sample will be stratified across different scales of the response: everyday New Yorkers, frontline workers--including first and second responders, critical infrastructure and other essential workers--and strategic level decision makers, managers, and planners. These results will be complemented by data from a diary study with 500 participants, and a sequence of oral history interviews with 200 narrators at expanding intervals, to produce a rich longitudinal perspective on the relationship between micro shifts in attitudes and relations, and macro transformations in urban structures and dynamics. Findings will inform sociological theories regarding the relationship between micro- and macro-levels of social organization, disaster preparedness and response, risk perception and social stress.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.