Are child and adolescent students more uncivil after COVID-19?

Today, I’m presenting two articles that I think are ultimately related. First, Spadafora, Al-Jbouri, & Volk (2024) published “Are Child and Adolescent Students More Uncivil After COVID-19?” in School Psychology. Here are the edited abstract and impact statements:

The goal of the current work was to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic school shutdowns may have impacted classroom incivility in children and adolescents. Study 1 compared prepandemic (Fall 2019) to postpandemic school shutdown (Fall 2022) rates of classroom incivility in a sample of 308 adolescents (49.7% boys; 61.0% White) between the ages of 9 and 14 (M = 12.06; SD = 1.38). Classroom incivility was significantly higher postpandemic shutdowns, while bullying, emotional problems, and friendships remained stable. In Study 2, we surveyed 101 primary educators (95% females; 88.1% White). Findings suggested that young students lacked social skills and knowledge of classroom expectations, contributing to increased classroom incivility. Our results highlight the need to monitor ongoing levels of classroom incivility. 

Our findings highlight that school shutdowns may have impacted classroom incivility in children and youth. Primary teachers discussed the lack of opportunities to teach civility during online learning and how this was evident in the classroom behavior of their students, while adolescents reported engaging in significantly higher levels of classroom incivility in the 2021–2022 school year. Our results highlight the need to monitor ongoing levels of classroom incivility. 

I thought this article was unsurprising but very important. I’ve written often about social and emotional development which was undoubtedly adversely impacted by COVID-19. The next article is an introduction to a special issue of American Psychologist. The entire issue is worth reading and I may come back to it in future blogs. Infurna, Jayawickreme, Woods-Jaeger & Zalta (2024) published “Understanding Adaptive Responses to Adversity: Introduction to the special issue on rethinking resilience and posttraumatic growth” in American Psychologist. Here are some excerpts:

Research on resilience and posttraumatic growth (PTG) has significantly advanced our understanding of human adaptability to adversity, reflecting a widespread belief in the United States that such adaptability is commonplace. However, recent studies have highlighted conceptual and methodological limitations in these fields. These limitations call into question the credibility of existing research and underscore the need for multidisciplinary perspectives in understanding adaptive responses to adversity. This special issue aims to provide a foundation for a new generation of resilience and PTG research. It brings together innovative theoretical and empirical work that focuses on several key areas: the multifaceted nature and impacts of adversity, the importance of clarifying resilience and PTG in marginalized communities, methodological advancements in the field, and challenges to core theoretical and methodological assumptions underlying our scientific practice.

The articles in this special issue focus on a wide range of adversities and traumas. These span multiple levels of analysis, including daily stressors, early-life adversity, family and community adversities, systemic adversities, historical traumas, and societal-level adversities such as the COVID-19 pandemic. An important advancement emphasized in this special issue is the recognition that adversities and traumas often arise from multiple levels, compound over time, and persist without clear boundaries. This perspective challenges the traditional view of adversity as discrete events with definitive start and end points.

Bergeman and Nelson (2024) collect five waves of daily survey data (28 days for each wave) every 6 months during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This enabled them to study how daily and global perceptions of adversity intersect with societal-level adversity. 

While this doesn’t directly address children and adolescents, I thought it helpful in suggesting ways in which the field had been too optimistic about resilience in the face of adversity of a variety of kinds, including the pandemic.