Fieldwork in Brazil (03.2022)
The COVIDGI Project developed interviews and focus groups in Porto Alegre and São Paulo to collect primary information about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country. The necessity for fieldwork comes from a gap in data on behaviour at the intraurban scale. This gap creates an uncertain decision environment, generating policy responses that lack context and may have negative unintended outcomes. Furthermore, certain factors decrease in adherence to non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as ideology or livelihoods. It becomes critical, therefore, to understand the motivations to behavior, including those of ideological origin, or imposed by the protection of livelihoods. We selected mobility as an exemplary feature of behavior, as it is deeply related to social distancing policies, is easy to correlate to existing movement metrics, and we suppose its practices were deeply impacted by the pandemic.
We outlined four regions of interest, aiming at one regions of middle (or upper) income and another of lower income in each city. To match this design, we interviewed 40 persons and held focus groups involving 34 of these. We did a first pilot in mid-December 2021 in Porto Alegre and had a second round in March 2022 in Porto Alegre and São Paulo.
It was a rich process, with many insights that suggest challenges in mental health among all groups, such as increased feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, and fear that led to insomnia, stress eating and drinking for example. Mobility changed a lot, starting with changes towards more local living like restricting travel distance and limited social interactions, among close friends and family only. Public transportation was also seen as a liability among all groups, but motivations for abandoning it varied. Among the middle class, ride-haling apps or private cars provided safer and convenient alternatives. For the lower-income groups, the choices were more difficult: for some it was overcrowded and allowed no social distancing. For others, though, when faced with unemployment and poverty, ticket prices became too expensive, and the solution found by many was not to travel at all. More on these results will feature in our upcoming publications. Follow our Twitter feed for updates and teasers!
Developing fieldwork during the pandemic was not easy, as it had to be postponed for more than 18 months. Nonetheless, all challenges were overcome with the help of partners such as PROPUR-UFRGS (https://www.ufrgs.br/propur/en/inicial-en/), INSPE (https://www.inspe.eco.br/), IAB-SP (https://www.iabsp.org.br/), and Teto Brasil (https://teto.org.br/). We thank and recognize your contributions wholeheartedly.