Dziecięca wizja pandemii
A children’s image of the pandemic

Summary/Abstract: The epidemic threat that humanity has had to face recently is a shared, multi-generationalexperience. It concerns and affects each and every one of us, including children. The aimof the article is to attempt at reconstructing the image of the pandemic in the languageof children who, in an interview based on a questionnaire, answered the question:What is a pandemic? In the analysis of over 100 interviews conducted between 2020–2021 with children aged 6–13, using the ethnolinguistic method, the following facets wereapplied based on the participants’ responses: a pandemic as a disease, virus, coronavirus,epidemic, state of emergency, time/period, quarantine, and pandemic versus an epidemic.The analysis of the collected material shows that children perceive the pandemic mainlyfrom a social perspective: as a period when social rules that apply are different than before.This is the point of view of a child who participates not only in the world of pandemicprohibitions, but also in conversations with adults interpreting the causes of the “plague”and in the reception of media messages. The image of the pandemic is the result of variousactivities of the child and contains their traces. In addition, the children’s vision of thepandemic reconstructed on the basis of qualitative research turns out to be consistentand shared among girls and boys of different ages, just as they shared the experienceof symptoms and effects of the “plague” in social life.

• Details
• Contents