Displaying intergenerational solidarity on TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic: understanding the implications in the grandparent-grandchild relationship

ABSTRACT

The habits of families are affected during the COVID-19 pandemic, with limitations to socialization or visits. Grandparents and grandchildren use social media to sustain interpersonal relationships, as well as display intergenerational solidarity to others. This paper presents a qualitative content analysis of the display of different dimensions of intergenerational solidarity between grandparents and grandchildren during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, on TikTok. The analysis extends the understanding of intergenerational solidarity between grandparents and grandchildren on TikTok, by highlighting which characteristics or activities they find important to display to other users of the platform. The results suggest that grandparents and grandchildren value qualities of physical touch and family celebrations (i.e. affectual solidarity), and big life events (i.e. normative solidarity). Moreover, grandparents and grandchildren refrain from consensual solidarity on TikTok, but other categories of intergenerational solidarity provide clues to differences in the public display of their respective roles.

KEYWORDS:

• TikTok
• grandparenting
• grandchildren
• COVID-19
• intergenerational solidarity
• family display

Acknowledgments

Author 1 receives funding from FWO (grant number G0E3718N). We thank our supervisors for proofreading the manuscript, the reviewers for their constructive feedback, and the students of the Qualitative Seminar (held in fall 2020) at author 1’s university for their feedback on the data gathering process.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Foundation Flanders [grant number G0E3718N].