Mary Marshall Clark - May 20, 2020

Mary Marshall Clark, "What we are learning: The NYC COVID-19 Oral History Narrative and Memory Archive"

This project, spearheaded by Denise Milstein and Ryan Hagen, began in March 2020 and received funding from a RAPID NSF grant to use mixed-methods design to conduct oral history interviews highlighting participant experiences during the pandemic. Run by the Interdisciplinary Center for Theory and Empirics (INCITE) at Columbia University, a team of 30 interviewers, representing diverse locations and life experiences (e.g., institutional decision makers, frontline workers, every day New Yorkers etc.) in NYC, oversee (i) intake questionnaire informs recruitment and gather data on a variety of characteristics (demographics, location, employment, social network site, experience with past citywide disasters, volunteering and civil engagement, COVID-19-specific concerns, and stress response measurement); (ii) unguided chronicles of 300 words in length; and (iii) oral history interviews at 1, 3, and 8 months from the first interview. The results from this project will be put in the Oral History Archives at Columbia Libraries. They are modeling this project based on the September 11, 2001 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Project where over 650 individuals were interviewed and over 900 hours of recording are documented. What they have learned so far is that there is denial of reality, confusion about what COVID-19 is, acceptance of the impact on work and family life, temporal confusion (e.g., disruption of orderly sense of past, present and future; loss of sense of future etc.), variability in trusting public instructions; varying levels of feeling intimacy and isolation etc. They are also interested in incorporating questions that may benefit the research community so please contact them at [email protected] or [email protected].