Young adults’ perceptions of information on social distancing measures and everyday life during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark and Sweden: an interview study

ABSTRACT

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Denmark and Sweden’s governments and health authorities implemented social distancing measures as the main strategy to limit the spread of the coronavirus. In Denmark, these were mostly mandatory, whereas in Sweden they were primarily voluntarily based. The aim of this study was to explore how young adults in Denmark and Sweden retrieved and perceived information during the COVID-19 pandemic and what their experiences of everyday life were with the implemented social distancing measures. To this end, 30 Danish and Swedish young adults between 18 and 25 years were interviewed. The participants considered themselves informed and reflected on multiple sources of information. However, social distancing measures were translated in different ways and had both negative and positive implications for their everyday lives. Many participants felt that their youth – as a significant phase in life – became restricted.

KEYWORDS:

• Youths
• adolescents
• comprehensibility
• communication
• compliance
• policy implementation

Acknowledgments

We thank all participants for taking their time to participate in the interviews and for providing valuable insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, so due to the sensitive nature of the research supporting data is not available.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Innovation Fund Denmark under Grant 0211-00026B.