Introduction
The spread of the coronavirus disease has led to global, crushing turning points, to an acceleration of the crisis of human lifestyle, relations, and production. It exposed the boundaries of a secure, social, geopolitical, technological, and industrial model. That moment radically turned the world upside down, plunged it into chaos and instability, forcing it to reconsider the entrenched laws and principles. There are many guesses about its appearance, and there is still no single answer to this question. Certainly, COVID-19 is an urgent problem requiring adjusting existing common opinions, ideas, and knowledge, searching for guilt and salvation.
COVID-19 is a well-designed field for implementing sociological research. More precisely, the COVID-19 pandemic can be the grounding context for research on risk factors, individualism, globalization vs. glocalization, structural inequalities, and so forth. Indeed, that kind of research on the coronavirus pandemic has mushroomed since 2020. One of the main features of that period, which has interested me, is the increasing influence of social inequalities on society. World Economic Forum reported that pandemic highlighted the unequal access to healthcare and different outcomes of disease progression (Myers). Another major issue is the digital divide. Although almost all people have changed their workplace to an online mode during the pandemic, many workers did not have access to technologies and stable Internet connection to work at home (Myers). Consequently, people from underdeveloped countries where the Internet connection quality is low cannot compete with people with decent Internet penetration (Myers). Therefore, it can be said that the social side of the pandemic is different health indicators and cases of infection between different social groups depending on class, gender, race, and ethnicity.
Another problem of the COVID-19 pandemic is an unequal distribution of coronavirus vaccines. Researchers from Duke University report that 53% of all vaccines are held by the richest countries, while 92% of the poorest countries will not achieve a 60% vaccination rate until 2023 or later (Mirza and Rauhala). Due to the fact that rich countries buy all the early doses of vaccines in advance, humanitarian initiatives like Covax cannot implement all the planned initiatives. The inequalities and social disparities of the COVID-19 will be the main topic of this research.
Further Research Analysis
The most important part of all preliminary work is to state the clear purpose and direction of future analysis. This will help set well-defined limitations of the research question and formulate the proper field for it. From the very beginning, it should be stated that research will be influenced by sociological concepts and theories applicable to the general topic of analysis. However, the study will not try to “fit” the findings into theory. Sociological theories will only help find the right direction in research, especially in selecting the necessary research methods.
Sociological Problem
The aim of this study is a theoretical and practical understanding of the pandemic through the prism of sociological risk factors, its meaning, and nature using the tools of sociology. The COVID-19 pandemic had the most harmful impact on minorities and disfranchised groups based on ethnicity, poverty, sexual orientation, and living location. Although the logic of the COVID-19 virus is “democratic” – everyone can get infected and suffer from the virus – “it potentially impacts certain groups more than others due to different living conditions and material circumstances” (Ward, p. 729). Therefore, the problem is the limited sociological understanding of pandemic’s influence on vulnerable groups of society. The factors that made the COVID-19 pandemic to be a huge risk for marginalized groups are underexplored. From this discussion, it is possible to formulate the key questions of the study:
- What factors define a pandemic as a social risk, and how does it affect the vulnerable parts of the population?
- Are there any special patterns in the current pandemic, and what consequences can the virus lead to humanity?
- What are the theories and strategies for eliminating this issue?
The research’s possible limitation is that it will not bring new meanings to the existing academic field. The theme is actively researched in different social sciences, from political science to sociology. Some academic journals have devoted entire volumes to discussing and conceptualizing processes that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, one of the ideas to summarize theoretical findings on the COVID-19 pandemic is not influenced by such a problem. In any case, such a generalization will help other scholars find new ideas and meanings for their research.
Preliminary Thesis Statement
Formulating a reasonable hypothesis is essential for every study. The main task is not just to describe a certain phenomenon but to show and prove the existence of cause-and-effect relationships. The main thesis is that the COVID 19 pandemic is a social risk that creates uncertainty about the future and has detrimental effects on vulnerable groups based on gender, race, ethnicity, poverty, and region of living.
The theory that helps to direct the research is Zygmunt Bauman’s view on late modernity. He created a concept of ‘liquid modernity to fully describe the processes that started and accelerated in the post-industrial era. Main Bauman’s argument can be formulated like this: we live in a world full of uncertainties, the weakening of any collective identities, and the integral role of economic relations (Bauman). The modern world of knowing means but not knowing the ends creates an extreme sense of uncertainty about the future, which leads to unmitigated anxiety. Zygmunt Bauman’s view on late modernity can help to conceptualize the context in what we are living to know. Although Bauman died in 2017, his texts describe the late modernity features that have many common grounds with the COVID-19 pandemic society.
Methodology
To study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people under the influence of social risk factors, this research will use both quantitative and qualitative methods. Such mixed methods research helps comprehensively study, explore, analyze such problems in-depth and in detail. The paper obtains in-depth interviews, content analysis, and textual analysis. This set of methods allows both to analyze the pandemic from theoretical and practical, statistical and discoursal aspects.
The main aim of interviews is to trace the sufferings and difficulties experienced by marginalized groups during pandemics. For that aim, it is beneficial to conduct about 10-15 semistructured interviews with members of low-income families, sexual and racial minorities, residents of far-away locations, and so forth. Qualitative methods do not require big samples of data because they mostly deal with personal stories and views. Interviews will help researchers find meaning in the interviews themselves, not in numbers and statistics. For this, it is worth holding a dialogue about their thoughts on the changes that occurred during the pandemic and the scale of difficulties they have related to healthcare access. Some interviews can be conducted online through text messages and/or voice/video calls. Voice/video calls can be recorded on an audio recorder with the participant’s permission for a more thorough study in the future. Interviewing also requires following ethical guidelines. The data collected should be kept secret and anonymous. Examples of possible questions are:
- What aspects of your life have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic?
- Do you think your social situation has deteriorated due to the pandemic?
Another method that will be used is content analysis. It is the only quantitative method in the research, and it was taken not just formally to show the acquaintance with quantitative methodology. The main idea of that method is that researcher “selects an item of textual content (i.e., a variable) that can be reliably and consistently observed and coded, and surveys the prevalence of that item in a sample of textual output” (Little, p. 83). In my research, it is useful to use that method to explore new concepts and perspectives regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. I can collect all the existing articles about the COVID-19 pandemic from peer-reviewed sociological scholarly journals and try to fund modifiers and related concepts that are located near the words “pandemic,” “COVID-19,” and so forth. Another name of this method that I want to use is corpus linguistics. The scholarly article will be a base (corpus) for further research on interesting findings that can contribute to the research questions answering.
The last method of the research is text analysis. This method explores other scholars’ texts to find new concepts and ideas that can help answer research questions. There are a lot of texts that were written since the pandemic started. That text analysis will help to investigate special patterns of the pandemic and the consequences that it can cause in the future. In addition, the analysis of secondary sources aims to find solutions to eliminate social and health disparities caused by the pandemic. The integral rule here is the focus on the influence of social risk factors. How other authors conceptualize these issues is important for adding depth to the study. This method fulfills the goal of conceptualizing a theoretical understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic on a vulnerable population.
Conclusion
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted huge inequalities and disparities in health indicators among vulnerable populations, especially racial minorities and low-income families. This paper proposes a study of trends caused by the pandemic through the lens of social risk factors. This approach will help us understand the COVID-19 pandemic from a different perspective. The study will use both quantitative and qualitative methods. Interviews with representatives of the target groups will help understand ordinary people’s experiences from their perspective. It is critical to give voice to these people and find the main patterns that unite these people in one group. Content analysis will help to formulate the main concepts with which one can describe the COVID-19 pandemic. Textual analysis of various sociologists’ texts is needed to understand a wide range of perspectives on the impact of social risk factors on life during pandemics. Such methodological setting aims to understand the problems people faced during the pandemic and formulate a theoretical design of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Works Cited
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid modernity. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.
Mirza, Atthar, and Emily Rauhala. “Covid vaccine inequality: Richer countries have fared better than poorer ones in vaccine rollout.”The Washington Post, 2021.
Myers, Joe. “5 things COVID-19 has taught us about inequality.”World Economic Forum, 2020.
Little, William, Ron McGivern, and Nathan Kerins. Introduction to sociology-2nd Canadian edition. BC Campus, 2016.
Ward, Paul R. “A Sociology of the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Commentary and Research Agenda for Sociologists.” Journal of Sociology, vol. 56, no. 4, 2020, pp. 726-735.