“We Can ‘Break Bread’ Virtually:” Routinized and Ritualized Aspects of Family Food Provisioning in the United States During Lockdown

ABSTRACT

Routines and rituals are ubiquitous across scholarship in family communication yet are overlapping and idiosyncratic concepts, making a clear distinction between them difficult. This paper builds clarification around the concepts by arguing for attending to what we call the routinized and ritualized aspects of family activities. We demonstrate this approach’s utility through a qualitative thematic discourse analysis of 697 Twitter posts discussing the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on family food practices in the United States. We identify three themes that convey the broad impacts of lockdown conditions on family food practices: bolstering, disruption, and reimagining. We then analyze each theme’s salience within daily meals and holiday meals – two food provisioning sites frequently considered routines and rituals, respectively. Theoretically, this paper forwards a conceptualization of routines and rituals that delineates the symbolic and instrumental elements embedded within each; empirically, it demonstrates the multifaced effects of the pandemic on family food life.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Jennifer Hardesty, Ramona Oswald, Sarah Elton, and Anelyse Weiler for their helpful feedback on this work. They would also like to thank the journal’s editor, Scott Myers, and the paper’s anonymous reviewers for pushing the paper’s analytical direction forward and helping see it to completion. Thank you as well to Dwayne Smith, who provided a complimentary social media data mining workshop to members of the Sociologists for Women in Society, which provided the impetus and foundational know-how for the data mining project.

Disclosure statement

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

Ethics approval, consent to participate and consent for publication

Because this is publicly available data, ethics approval was not obtained, and consent was not obtained from Twitter users. This is common practice in our field. However, in acknowledgment of the “murkiness” that surrounds the privacy of internet data that is at once public but also personal (Markham, 2012), we make efforts to anonymize the tweets so that they cannot be searched directly (as discussed in the methods section of the text).

Availability of data and material

The data are not publicly available due to confidentiality concerns but are available upon request

Code availability

We have made the code for this project publicly available on GitHub, accessed here: https://github.com/merinoleschuk/Routines-Rituals-on-Twitter

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. This sample size aligns with similar studies qualitatively examining Twitter posts during the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Freeman et al., 2022; O’Connor et al., 2021).

2. This period represents the second celebration of Easter during COVID, given that Easter in 2020 fell shortly after lockdown conditions were first initiated in March of that year. This holiday was less salient in our data perhaps for this reason, or perhaps due to the relative distance it occupied from initial lockdown measures over one year prior.

3. We were able to identify users from 45 of 50 states (plus, the District of Columbia), however, this number likely under-represents the geographic diversity of the sample as users did not all specify their geographic locations (with many using broad identifiers like “The United States”). Our data are time-stamped and show tweets posted during all times of the day and night; however, we were not able to capture the exact time users posted given that they were posting from different time zones and the API recorded times using the time zone where the data mining occurred.

4. This definition generally aligns with the treatment of ritualized communication by family communication scholars (Baxter & Braithwaite, 2006; Galvin, 2006).

5. This parallels conceptions of “routine behaviors” within the literature on relational maintenance, which are often contrasted with “strategic behaviors” to understand how partners maintain their relationships (Canary & Stafford, 1994; Stafford et al., 2000).

Additional information

Funding

This research was not supported by any external funding body.