The Pandemic Journaling Project: A new dataset of first-person accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic

Background

The rapid global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic affected different regions, communities, and individuals in vastly different ways that interdisciplinary social scientists are well-positioned to document and investigate. This paper describes an innovative mixed-methods dataset generated by a research study that was designed to chronicle and preserve evidence of the pandemic’s divergent effects: the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP). The dataset was generated by leveraging digital technology to invite ordinary people around the world to document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their everyday lives over a two-year period (May 2020-May 2022) using text, images, and audio.

Methods and Findings

PJP’s weekly, online, bilingual (English/Spanish) journaling platform was open to anyone with access to a smartphone or computer, including teens aged 15–17 with permission of a parent or guardian. Participants first completed a baseline quantitative survey, after which they were invited to create two journal entries in response to suggested narrative prompts. In each subsequent week, participants received weekly invitations to contribute via their choice of email or SMS (text message). Each invitation included a link to that week’s journaling prompts and accompanying survey questions.

Participants could join the project at any point between May 2020 and May 2022. PJP employed a cohort design. Regardless of when they joined, all received the narrative prompts and accompanying survey questions in the same order. Participants could stop participating at any point, and they could later restart if they wished. The project welcomed any interested participant and sought to capture as broad a range of perspectives as possible, while also taking measures to include voices that might not otherwise be preserved in the historical record.

The project launched in May 2020. In the two years it operated as a weekly journaling platform, PJP generated nearly 27,000 individual journal entries from over 1,800 people in 55 countries around the world. Data from PJP’s first phase (PJP-1) are now accessible at the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) at Syracuse University.

Conclusions

The first phase of the Pandemic Journaling Project has produced an innovative multimedia dataset that can support studies of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected a wide range of communities across a wide range of outcomes including mental health, reproductive health, vaccine hesitancy, and trust in health professionals, among others. The dataset is available to researchers who follow established data protection protocols and procedures. These data protection measures will be in place for 25 years, through 2049, after which all PJP-1 data will become a fully accessible public archive via QDR.