Natural hazards and life course consequences in a time of pandemic
Dr. Marc Scott (NYU PRIISM co-director) and Ben Edwards (Australian National University) edited a special issue of the journal, Longitudinal and Life Course Studies entitled, "Natural hazards and life course consequences in a time of pandemic."
Introduction to the issue
This special issue brings together studies from the UK, Ireland, Australia, Ethiopia, South Korea and Switzerland focused on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is worth noting that while longitudinal in nature, the data from these studies spans the first two years of the pandemic and that the experiences of populations in these countries were very different. The UK, Ireland and Switzerland all experienced very high daily cases relative to the other three countries in this special issue with peaks in March 2020, November/December 2020 and December 2021 (see Figure). For Australia, Ethiopia and South Korea COVID-19 cases were very low across the first two years of the pandemic (with a rise in cases in December 2021 in Australia).
Who's minding the children: Gender equity in the first two years of the pandemic
Dr. Scott also has a paper on childcare during the pandemic with Dr. Sharon Weinberg and an A3SR student researcher, Joseph Marlo. The paper is titled, “Who's minding the children: Gender equity in the first two years of the pandemic" in the International Journal of Social Welfare.
Abstract
The wholesale changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic to men and women's paid work arrangements and work–family balance provide a natural experiment for testing the common elements of two theories, needs exposure (Schafer et al. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue Canadienne De Sociologie, 57(4);2020:523–549) and parental proximity (Sullivan et al. Family Theory & Review, 2018;10(1):263–279) against a third theory also suggested by Schafer et al. (2020), and labelled in this article, entrenchment/exacerbation of gender inequality. Both needs exposure and parental proximity suggest that by being home because of the pandemic, in proximity to their children, fathers are exposed to new and enduring family needs, which may move them toward more equal sharing in childcare and other domestic responsibilities. By contrast to studies that have tested such theories using retrospective, self-report survey data over a 2-year period, we analyse more than a decade of time-use diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) that covers the first 2 years of the pandemic. We model the secular and quarterly trends to predict what would have occurred in the absence of the pandemic, contrasting this to what indeed happened. Our analyses consider aggregate and individual impacts, using methods of sequence analysis, clustering, and matching. Among our results, we find that the division of childcare responsibilities did not become more equitable during the pandemic. Suggestions for future research are provided as are suggestions for the implementation of social policies that could influence greater gender equity in unpaid work and childcare.