Assessing social resilience during pandemics

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the world hard since its outbreak at the end of 2019 and continues affecting societies until now. Unlike in natural disasters, which have been researched extensively, it seems less clear how to measure social resilience and which factors can enhance or impede social resilience in the context of pandemics.

Prof. Renate Schubert, Dr Tingting Wu, Dr Natalia Borzino and Dr Jonas Joerin from Future Resilient Systems (FRS), and Dr Ante Busic-Sontic from ETH Zurich conduct a comparative study between Singapore and Switzerland to assess social resilience during COVID-19. They have launched a series of online surveys in both countries to monitor the social resilience indicators over time and observe how they change during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through analysing the responses from these surveys, they aim to understand and identify the key indicators determining social resilience in the context of pandemics.

In this technical note, they focus on the relevance of cooperation and trust, respectively, for social resilience. Current results show that in both countries residents’ cooperation with and their trust in their leaders is relatively higher compared to the cooperation of residents among themselves. Social cohesion improved in both countries but not so for social support and social network activities.

The study suggests that supporting others and cooperating with others “virtually” is important to enhance social cooperation and hence social resilience during a pandemic. Creating more opportunities for such virtual forms of cooperation and raising awareness for their existence and relevance seems to matter for enhancing social resilience in case of a pandemic crisis.

For full details, please download Download FRS Technical Note. 01: Social Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparisons between Singapore and Switzerland (PDF, 293 KB).