Memoirs collected in the competition "Daily life in the time of coronavirus"
Creators: name: Felczak, Joanna
name: Błędowski, Piotr
name: Kubicki, Paweł
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: memoirs
diaries
competition
pandemic
COVID-19

description: The diaries were collected as part of the “Everyday Life in the Time of the Coronavirus” competition organized by the Institute of Social Economy of the Warsaw School of Economics and the Institute of Sociology of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. The contest was carried out in two editions. The first edition of the competition covered the beginning of the coronavirus in Poland in the period March 2020-July 2020. 143 diaries covering the period of the first edition of the competition are available in this collection. The second edition of the competition covered the period November 2020 - April 2021. 144 diaries covering the time of the second edition of the competition are available in this  collection. In the period covered by the contest, there were three waves of pandemics and three lockdowns in Poland in 2020 and 2021. The daily diary entries make it possible to assess the challenges that the diarists faced and the changes in the functioning of their households. Diarists submitted more than 700 entries to the competition. The awarded competition entries were published by the SGH Publishing House in two collections. In 2022, under the scientific editorship of Ł. Posłuszny, P. Błędowski and P. Kubicki, the study “Everyday life in the times of coronavirus Volume 1” covering the first stage of the competition was published, and in 2025, under the scientific editorship of K. Trawińska-Konador, J.Felczak “Everyday life in the times of coronavirus Volume 2” covering the works from the second phase of the competition was published. An inquiry was made to all the authors of the diaries about the possibility of using their work to create the present collection, with the assumption of prior anonymization of the diaries. In the present collection, 287 diaries are available, whose authors agreed to this form of publication. This material was anonymized and digitized as part of the project “Households in the time of the coronavirus. Work, education, and support under uncertainty” funded by NCN under grant 2020/39/B/HS5/03121.
description: The diaries were collected as part of the “Everyday Life in the Time of the Coronavirus” competition implemented in two editions in 2020 and 2021. The theme of the diaries is experiencing everyday life, struggling with uncertainty and adapting to changes in functioning in the social space. The diarists' individual experiences of the first 3 lockdowns in Poland reflect the changes caused by the pandemic and other events of the time.  

The diaries reflect the diversity of emotions that accompanied Poles during the successive stages of the pandemic. Among other things, one can find in them panic buying, reaction to the introduced lockdowns, fatigue with the restrictions, waiting for vaccines and ways to break the restrictions, struggles with online education and changes that occurred in the financial situation, housing and daily routine of the diarists and their loved ones. In accordance with the competition proclamation, we asked about the changes that are important to diarists. The resulting survey material reflected this individual perspective and highlighted the variation in the evaluation of the policies implemented in 2020 and 2021, in the evaluation of the functioning of public institutions and in the evaluation of the support provided by the State to various professional and social groups. The subjectivity of the respondents is also evident in their assessment of the significance of the pandemic as an emergency. The diaries show whom the COVID-19-induced crisis affected, how it manifested itself, what costs it caused, and how the diarists dealt with it.