Since May 2020, the Pandemic Journaling Project has collected diary entries, audio samples, and photos from participants around the world about life during the COVID-19 pandemic. On February 15, Katherine Mason and Sarah Willen, associate professors of archeology at Brown University and the University of Connecticut, respectively, made the project's data available for 25 years upon request.
This data is currently housed in the Syracuse University Qualitative Data Repository for researchers approved by Mason, Willen, and the researchers' university's Institutional Review Board.
Both Mason and Willen noted that Sebastian Kercher, QDR's deputy director and assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, is instrumental in managing the PJP archives.
Willen said he knew from the beginning that “this project…is designed for posterity,” a sentiment that echoes Karcher and his team's work at QDR, where they “I'm always thinking about the long term,” he said.
“It became clear very quickly that QDR was the ideal partner in terms of ensuring access to materials and ensuring participant confidentiality,” Willen added.
Confidentiality issues were one of the key factors PJP considered when deciding to share data. “One big thing is that if you want instant access for everyone, you have to comb through and remove potential identifying information,” Willen said, adding that the project's funding and time added that it was not possible.
The solution was to make the data available to researchers on request. This model will last for 25 years. Although the data will not be made publicly available until 2049, Mason and Willen said it will help ensure participant confidentiality in the years immediately following the pandemic.
Despite reduced attention to COVID-19, the project continues to study the impact of the pandemic and is adapting its methodology as the pandemic evolves and changes. . For example, at the beginning of the project, Mason and Willen invited participants to contribute weekly, but in the second phase of the project, in May 2022, they will collect samples every three months. Did.
Willen explained that she and her colleagues designed the project as a form of “archival work.” She hoped that the project would “make it possible to write an unbiased and just history in which people are not left behind because they do not have a strong voice in society and politics.”
Mason and Willen said the main goal of the project is to better understand the role of community-based organizations during the pandemic and to help these organizations operate in the future. To that end, the two recently took on sub-projects under PJP that focus on specific communities, such as first-generation college students. Willen said students are being asked to “regularly reflect on how the pandemic has affected and continues to affect them.”
They also focused on New York City's immigrant communities, particularly South Asian and Latina women.
Mason has no specific hopes for future projects related to the project's data, but hopes its findings will be used to understand ordinary people's experiences during extraordinary times. is. Willen similarly hopes that “people who don't have personal memories of the pandemic will be able to access these materials.”
Karcher said that PJP is “a very good model for ambitious, large-scale, team-based qualitative research,” and even suggested that it could change the course of qualitative research in the future.
Mr. Mason, Mr. Willen, and Mr. Karcher all expressed their gratitude for their work on this project and said that the project will continue to contribute to post-pandemic society through the exhibition.
“As anthropologists, we've created something that helps people during a really devastating and horrifying time,” Willen said. “That's not something anthropologists often do.”
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