Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Jan 11:6:785201.
doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.785201. eCollection 2021.

My Home is my Castle? The Role of Living Arrangements on Experiencing the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence From Germany

Alexander Langenkamp  1 , Tomás Cano  1   2 , Christian S Czymara  1
Affiliations

My Home is my Castle? The Role of Living Arrangements on Experiencing the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence From Germany

Alexander Langenkamp et al. Front Sociol. .

Abstract

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, social restrictions and social distancing policies forced large parts of social life to take place within the household. However, comparatively little is known about how private living situations shaped individuals experiences of this crisis. To investigate this issue, we analyze how experiences and concerns vary across living arrangements along two dimensions that may be associated with social disadvantage: loneliness and care. In doing so, we employ quantitative text analysis on open-ended questions from survey data on a sample of 1,073 individuals living in Germany. We focus our analyses on four different household structures: living alone, shared living without children, living with a partner and children, and single parents. We find that single parents (who are primarily single mothers) are at high risk of experiencing care-related worries, particularly regarding their financial situation, while individuals living alone are most likely to report feelings of loneliness. Those individuals living in shared houses, with or without children, had the lowest risk of experiencing both loneliness and care-related worries. These findings illustrate that the living situation at home substantially impacts how individuals experienced and coped with the pandemic situation during the first wave of the pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19; crisis; household structure; living conditions; loneliness; social inequality; well-being.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Word network for single parents (correlations >0.5).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Predicted topic probabilities for single parents.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Word network for couples with child(ren) (correlations >0.25).
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Predicted topic probabilities for couples with child(ren).
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Word network for those living alone (correlations >0.25).
FIGURE 6
FIGURE 6
Predicted topic probabilities for those living alone.
FIGURE 7
FIGURE 7
Word network for shared living without children (correlations >0.25).
FIGURE 8
FIGURE 8
Predicted topic probabilities for shared living without children.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Alon T., Doepke M., Olmstead-Rumsey J., Tertilt M. (2020). This Time It's Different: The Role of Women's Employment in a Pandemic Recession. NBER Work. Pap. Ser. No, 27660. 10.3386/w27660 - DOI
    1. Andrew A., Dias M. C., Farquharson C., Kraftman L., Krutikova S., Phimister A., et al. (2020). The Gendered Division of Paid and Domestic Work under Lockdown. Covid Econ. Vetted Real-time Pap.
    1. Bauer A., Weber E. (2020). COVID-19: How Much Unemployment Was Caused by the Shutdown in Germany? Appl. Econ. Lett. 28, 1053–1058. 10.1080/13504851.2020.1789544 - DOI
    1. Baumeister R. F., Leary M. R. (1995). The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation. Psychol. Bull. 117, 497–529. 10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Bavel J. J. V., Baicker K., Boggio P. S., Capraro V., Cichocka A., Cikara M., et al. (2020). Using Social and Behavioural Science to Support COVID-19 Pandemic Response. Nat. Hum. Behav. 4, 460–471. 10.1038/s41562-020-0884-z - DOI - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources