Results of the COVIDisc project on the production, perception, and reception of COVID-19 discourses

The containment of the COVID-19 pandemic relies heavily on the communication between public health organizations and individual social groups (Azizi et al. 2020). Therefore, public discourses and discursive practices of specific audiences play a crucial role in the policy implementation during a pandemic. The SNSF-funded COVIDisc project focused on 15- 34-year-olds in German- and Italian-speaking Switzerland. This age group is very mobile and socially active, and society demands solidary behavior. For that reason, it is particularly important to reach this group through communication (cf. Friemel/Geber 2021). The project is based on a triangulated research design (Dreesen & Stücheli-Herlach 2019) including (1) a corpus-centered discourse analysis including media and Twitter data (production of discourse), (2) survey and interviews with 15-34-year-olds (perception of discourse), and (3) expert interviews (reflection of discourse). We will present the project’s main results, e.g., how COVID-19 was perceived in the first weeks of 2020 and how a common ground emerges. We will show how the dangerousness and potential lethality of the virus is perceived by younger individuals and what experts said about their learning of key strategic principles of actors in public communication. We show how the group of 15-34-year-olds is constructed through patterns of language use and how they learn about COVID-19. Furthermore, it can be shown that solidarity is a discourse topic during lockdown, but communicating solidarity is one of the biggest challenges for public communication actors. This is related to discourse positions: Who sends out information, who disseminates it, and who remains unheard