Parent Accounts of COVID-19 and the M(ai)cro Environment: Links to Decision Making and Coparenting
Author: Kellie Gorman
Faculty Supervisor: Jeff Cookston
Department: Psychology
The COVID-19 pandemic had wide-spread impacts on parenting and daily lived realities regarding parenting decisions. Additionally, parents’ coparenting alliance has been influenced by the pandemic. While much is known about the pandemic’s impact on parenting decisions regarding vaccinations, stay-at-home orders, and online schooling, little is known about how parents of school-aged children’s day-to-day lives are still being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, little is known in narrative format regarding parenting experiences during COVID-19 and how life is now. I aim to gather narratives from parents to better understand how they experienced the pandemic and the way COVID-19 is still relevant in their daily lives. The relevancy of COVID-19 in parenting may also be influenced by their environment in terms of location. With the goal of capturing how parents are telling and recounting their experiences, I propose a mixed methods data collection. Specifically, I will sample 50 parents of school-aged children using Qualtrics. I propose a few hypotheses. First, I expect parents will recount COVID-19 as still being very relevant in their daily lived decisions made regarding raising their children. Next, parents will report more thoughts of COVID-19 influencing their daily decisions if their COVID-19 impact scores are higher. Third, when parents feel more aligned with their partners about their coparenting, they will feel better about the state of COVID-19 in their daily lived realities. Lastly, parents who live in metro areas with higher google trends data will have more COVID-19 related decisions daily.