Dissertation
“It wasn’t about the guidelines; it was about the image.” College students’ social practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: the role of performative health behaviors
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Autumn 2023
DOI: 10.25820/etd.007023
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic represented a major disruption to society, and its impact is still felt to this day. This disruption has been thoroughly investigated quantitatively, yet there is little qualitative investigation into the claims made by quantitative researchers about drivers of social behavior during pandemic. This paper seeks to address that gap in the research, to provide an accounting of the drivers and motivators behind different social behaviors during the pandemic in order to better understand the ways in which people navigated COVID-19 and the associated risks of exposure to the virus in the days pre- and post- effective treatment and vaccination. To do this, I conducted 64 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with students at the University of Iowa. In these interviews, I took a grounded theoretical approach and conducted abductive analysis in order to create a new theoretical framework that aimed to explain not just student health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, but other health behaviors commonly studied by medical sociologists. My participants revealed a tumultuous and unmoored experience navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, juggling their academic, physical, and mental well-being while navigating a the new and (to them) unprecedented landscape that a global pandemic presents. Using the works of Lemert, Goffman, West & Zimmerman, and Connell, I create a new theoretical framework that examines health behavior as performative, done not just to attain and maintain physical and psychological well-being, but to attain and maintain status and prestige among their social groups.
In chapter 2, I discuss how pandemic restrictions impacted college students’ social and academic lives, disrupting their expectations of the “college experience” and the ways in which they navigated this disruption. I discuss how factors such as loneliness and isolation heavily affected students’ motivation to do well in their courses, causing a noticeable drop in their grades, especially among freshmen. The unenforceability of social gathering restrictions, particularly off-campus, created an environment in which those who had already established friend groups were able to spend most of their semester with their friends, unengaged with their coursework. Freshmen, most of whom did not know anybody prior to coming to the university, were the most negatively impacted by these restrictions and struggled to find community at the university during the pandemic. All of this ran directly counter to students’ expectations of what it meant to be a student at the University of Iowa, leading many to find ways to bend and break pandemic restrictions to maintain some semblance of what they had anticipated. These findings are discussed in the context of loneliness and its impact on academic achievement, and the importance of the “college experience” to the academic and emotional well-being of students.
In chapter 3, I identify three types of students based on their social behavior during the pandemic: distancers, who did everything they could to follow CDC social distancing guidelines, stayed home, and did not gather with friends or colleagues they did not live with. Selective distancers, who did not follow CDC social distancing guidelines closely, but limited the friends that they gathered with and cautiously navigated pandemic restrictions to minimize their exposure to COVID-19 as much as possible while maintaining their social life. Non-distancers, the last group of students, actively shirked and sometimes openly rebelled against pandemic restrictions. Through my analysis of their behaviors, I reveal that many of these students were more concerned about the social ramifications of their behavior than the personal- and public- health consequences of their choices. I discuss this in the context of their expectations of the college experience: in how, for many, their behavior was a means to end: to achieving the ideal college experience without having to account for the ways in which their actions may contradict the stated values and beliefs of their peers. I also discuss how, for non-distancers in particular, the politicization of pandemic behavior incentivized rebellion rather than conformity.
In the fourth chapter, I utilize Lemert, Goffman, West and Zimmerman, and Connell to construct a new theoretical framework that can be deployed to analyze and better understand the social behaviors of the students in my study. This theory, which I call “doing health,” analyzes health behavior as the result of a complex process of interpretation of prescribed behaviors that is filtered through an individual’s health framework, and is a product of an imprecise, messy calculation of the physical and social consequences of accepting or rejecting that behavior. I outline how this framework can be used to understand the motivations behind and drivers of social behaviors during the pandemic, and suggest areas in which doing health can be deployed in well-established areas of study within medical sociology in order to better understand a myriad of public-facing health behaviors.
In chapter 5, I summarize each chapter of my study and discuss their contributions to the field. I discuss the implications of this study on public health policy moving forward, especially in the context of the next global pandemic, whenever that may come. I also suggest exciting new applications for my theory, doing health, and argue that its utilization within medical sociology will reveal both new truths about the complex and myriad influences on health behaviors and potential new health interventions moving forward.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- “It wasn’t about the guidelines; it was about the image.” College students’ social practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: the role of performative health behaviors
- Creators
- Sean Kearney
- Contributors
- Sarah Harkness (Advisor)Michael Sauder (Committee Member)Jessica Welburn-Paige (Committee Member)Ion Vasi (Committee Member)Natoshia Askelson (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- Sociology
- Date degree season
- Autumn 2023
- DOI
- 10.25820/etd.007023
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- xi, 169 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2023 Sean Kearney
- Language
- English
- Date submitted
- 08/01/2023
- Description illustrations
- Illustrations, graphs, charts
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 148-162).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
When undergraduate students returned to the University of Iowa for the Fall 2020-Spring 2021 semester, there was a large, visible campaign put on by both University and public health officials to encourage students to follow pandemic restrictions on gathering and to follow the CDC’s suggested social distancing guidelines. This communication was demonstrated to be ineffective when thousands of reported cases of COVID-19 ripped through the student body within the first two weeks of classes resuming. Pictures and videos of packed bars and house parties confirmed that many students were not concerned about COVID-19 and its potential effects on their health and their communities’ health. My dissertation asks a simple question: why?
To answer this question, I interviewed 64 students about their social behavior during the pandemic and the ideas, feelings, and beliefs that motivated them. Through these interviews, I reveal the severe negative impact that pandemic restrictions had on their psychological, social, and academic well-being. Further, I demonstrate how, for many of the students I spoke to, public displays of adherence to or rejection of CDC guidelines – such as the choice to wear or not wear a mask – were done to maintain status among their peers, and were not done in consideration for their health. I argue that much of the public-facing health behaviors we witnessed during the pandemic was performative, and that the core motivation behind the choice to follow or not follow pandemic restrictions for many (but not all) individuals was the social consequences of doing or not doing so, rather than the health-related consequences.
- Academic Unit
- Sociology and Criminology
- Record Identifier
- 9984546849902771
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