Living through Lockdown: Social Inequalities and Transformations during the COVID-19 Crisis in France

OCS PAPERS JULY 2020This working paper offers an overview of the first stage of the Coping with Covid (CoCo) project, which tracks the behaviors and attitudes of a representative panel of the French metropolitan population during the COVID-19 lockdown. We conducted five survey waves and administered daily journals of open-ended responses between April and June 2020 among a sample of 1,216 people from a pre-existing panel (ELIPSS). Earlier surveys of this sample allowed us to better contextualize changes that may have occurred during this unusual period.We outline four experiential dimensions during the lockdown period: relation to work, everyday activities and time use, self-assessed health and well-being, and the framing of the pandemic crisis. What we found follows traditional inequality patterns and also reveals some unexpected changes in social practices and attitudes