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Governmental Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic - A Quantitative Ethnographic Comparison of Public Health Authorities’ Communication in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden

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Advances in Quantitative Ethnography (ICQE 2021)

Abstract

The Scandinavian countries are often seen as a unity. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic striking differences on how the countries approached the crisis became evident. This quantitative-ethnographic (QE) study aimed to understand political and cultural similarities and differences between the three Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Norway and Sweden – through their crisis communications during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we focused on how the health authorities of the three countries, in their press releases, treated information about COVID-19 and acted in four fields: reorganization of population behavior, containment of viral transmission, preparation of health systems, and management of socioeconomic impacts. As a methodology, the QE tools nCoder and ENA were applied, respectively: to code the press releases and to correlate the treatment of information with the four fields of action.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-covid-19?country=DNK~NOR~SWE.

  2. 2.

    https://en.ssi.dk/.

  3. 3.

    https://www.fhi.no/en/.

  4. 4.

    https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/.

  5. 5.

    https://www.octoparse.com/.

  6. 6.

    https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tidytext/vignettes/tidytext.html.

  7. 7.

    https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093331?hl=en.

  8. 8.

    http://www.n-coder.org/.

  9. 9.

    http://www.epistemicnetwork.org/.

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Correspondence to Karoline Schnaider .

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Schnaider, K., Schiavetto, S., Meier, F., Wasson, B., Allsopp, B.B., Spikol, D. (2021). Governmental Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic - A Quantitative Ethnographic Comparison of Public Health Authorities’ Communication in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. In: Ruis, A.R., Lee, S.B. (eds) Advances in Quantitative Ethnography. ICQE 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1312. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67788-6_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67788-6_28

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