Developing amid COVID-19: Adolescent meaning making across the first year of the pandemic

Abstract

The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic was a tumultuous time for adolescents across North America. Social and family lives were upended, schooling was often in flux, activities and milestones were canceled, and the political and medical uncertainties dominated societal discourses. A growing research base demonstrates how the pandemic impacted young people across 2020 and 2021, but there is less work on how they made meaning and incorporated these interpretations into emerging identities. This study integrates surveys in the spring and fall 2020 with interviews in winter 2021 to explore how 18 United States and Canadian adolescents made meaning across time, with a specific focus on the impacts on their family, peer, and school lives. Four main themes were demarcated in the analyses: personal growth and maturation from experiences of the pandemic; concrete skill development, new learning strategies, and new activities tied to remote schooling; redefined or reimagined social identity and connections; and stressors of the pandemic as opportunities for deeper appreciation of family relationships and values, even amid increased tension and conflict. These findings highlight potential ways that adolescents’ demonstrated resilience through their meaning making, which could contribute to strengths-based understandings to complement the current attention to negative outcomes.