Bear in a Window: collecting Australian children’s stories of the COVID-19 pandemic

1 Introduction

Throughout Australia’s early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 onwards, a strict lockdown was in place across many cities and towns across the country. A strict lockdown included extended periods of home confinement and the closure of all non-essential workplaces, schools, and retail and entertainment venues. Individuals and families in lockdown were only permitted to go outside for an hour of exercise daily and were required to stay within five kilometres of their home. Some residents of the city of Melbourne put teddy bears in their windows facing towards the street (Figure 1) to attract the attention of people out walking through their rather deserted neighbourhoods. Families with children started to make a game of spotting the bears on their daily walks. This provided the inspiration for the name of our project, Bear in a Window, where we collected Australian children’s stories and experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Figure 1:

A bear in a window, referred to as Covey Bear in the study (Photo property of Barbara Kelly).

This topic is particularly pertinent considering the fact that the city of Melbourne hit the world record for the number of days spent in lockdown in 2021 (Boaz 2021). The Oxford Blavatnik School of Government rated government restrictions in the pandemic on a scale of 0–100, with a higher number indicating more stringent restrictions (Hale et al. 2021). At 71.76, Australia’s score (retrieved on 20 September 2021) was the highest of all OECD countries, with the United States at 61.57 and the United Kingdom at 35.64.

The motivation for our project stems from the fact that children’s voices and narratives are often absent from discourse and historical experiential reports of major world events. For example, while there are reports of adult recollections of being a child and living through the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 (e.g. James 2019), there are very few archives with actual children’s reports of their experiences. We know from previous work in Christchurch, New Zealand, where a “QuakeBox” was set up to allow people to share their stories, that giving people voice after major events can have a therapeutic effect (Clark et al. 2016; see also Carmichael et al. 2022). Similar outcomes have emerged from the HONOR project, which is a corpus of interviews on the topic of Hurricane Harvey (Englebretson et al. 2020). Neither the QuakeBox nor the HONOR project include recordings of children. However, the MI Diaries project (Sneller et al. 2022) and Lothian Diary Project (Hall-Lew et al. 2022) invite adults and children to recount their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. These projects indicate a relatively recent interest in including the voices of children in the collective memory of major world events, and in (socio)linguistic research more generally. Our project will contribute to this growing area of research and provide a snapshot of a unique event in Australian (and world) history, with data being accessible to researchers and the general public into the future.

The Bear in a Window project provided children with an opportunity to give voice to a range of topics that had importance for them in light of having to stay at home in a state of restricted movement across space and time, without being filtered through the lens of an adult’s perspective. In this paper, following a discussion of experiment design and method (Section 2), we present the topics children raised and a linguistic analysis of how children talked about them (Section 3). We explore not just what children say, but how they say it, by examining the discourse structures and features that help to situate or contextualize their perspectives. In Section 4, we reflect on the pros and cons of running this kind of unsupervised data collection entirely online and discuss future steps for the project. In line with the theme of this special issue, we stress that the focus of our paper is on highlighting the procedure and method for online (remote) data collection in a specific context: in this case, the COVID-19 pandemic. Our data set is relatively small (18 speakers), and our analysis is exploratory for now, with a focus on what we have learnt throughout the process (see in particular Section 4).

2 Method and materials

2.1 Data collection methods

Our project was a fully online, COVID-safe task which we designed and hosted on Gorilla (https://gorilla.sc/), a platform which is commonly used in the behavioural sciences, and which has a user-friendly interface. The learning curve is not too steep, rendering the process of designing online experiments fairly intuitive. The payment structure is affordable, and we opted for the “pay as you go” option, which cost us just over one Australian dollar per completed respondent, only deducted when a respondent fully completed the task. The link to our experiment was available through our project website. We advertised the study via posters and flyers, on social media, and in one TV interview. Recruitment was targeted at parents/guardians of children aged 3–12 years.

From the website, parents or guardians could read about the project and project team, and then click on a link to take part, which redirected them to Gorilla. There they were informed that their child needed to complete the task on a tablet, desktop, or laptop. At this stage, the parent or guardian read a plain language statement and gave informed consent. They then completed some demographic questions (age and gender of child, ethnic/cultural background, language(s) spoken at home, and postcode). Following this, and in line with our research aims to capture children’s voices and experiences, the parent or guardian was instructed to pass the device to the child, so they could complete the task with minimal prompting from an adult. They were shown the following text on-screen: “Thanks for your help. Now it’s your child’s turn! When they’re in front of the device and ready to go, click Next!” Since this was unsupervised research, the following instructions were shown to parents (in addition to the image in Figure 2):

Figure 2:

Image used in task to encourage children to engage in the task independently and in a quiet location (Photo taken by Barbara Kelly).

We want to record your child’s stories clearly! Please make sure your child:

1. Is in a quiet location, with not too much background sound

2. Stays close to the tablet/laptop device

3. Doesn’t move around too much

Before the children commenced recording, they were prompted to do a sound and microphone check, by playing a sound and making sure they heard it, and then recording themselves saying “Hello, Australia!”. This was then played back to them. Overall, the quality of our recordings was quite good, but we did have issues with younger siblings being present who talked over some of the recordings. We will discuss these issues further in Section 2.3.

All instructions for children from this point on were provided on-screen and via a friendly voice-over, to accommodate children not yet able to read. Children were asked to record themselves responding to each of the two questions, with an image of our mascot, Covey Bear (Figure 1) shown on-screen. They were asked to consider the following questions, which they responded to one at a time while looking at an image of Covey and an accompanying large sad face for Question 1 (Figure 3) and an accompanying large smiley face for Question 2:

1. Can you tell Covey a story about something that was not so good about having to stay at home all the time?

2. Can you tell Covey a story about something that was good about having to stay at home all the time?

Figure 3:

Screenshot of task showing Covey Bear, Question 1, accompanying sad face, countdown timer, and Stop Recording and Next buttons.

Children had 2 min to respond to each question, with a graphic timer indicating for them when their time was running out. At the end of each 2 min block, they had the opportunity to extend their comments in a new 2 min recording block.

2.2 Participants

Eighteen children participated, from four Australian states: Victoria, Tasmania, Western Australia, and New South Wales. Our participants (13 males, 5 females) were aged 3–12 years, and their recordings were orthographically transcribed. All participants were English speakers from a range of linguistic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. The average incomes across the postcodes where the participating children lived were higher than the national average.

We note that for an experiment that was live for almost a full calendar year, the total number of participants was below what we had anticipated. The analytics in Gorilla show that there were 18 full completions of the task (listed as “complete” on the Gorilla server). In addition to this, there were 43 participants who started the task and made some recordings but did not “finish” it (listed as “live”), which resulted in the recordings not being analysable since they were not uploaded to the Gorilla server. Finally, there were 64 who started the task, but exited before any recordings were made (listed as “rejected”). Our own test runs of the experiment are included in this “rejected” figure, however.

Of the 43 “live” participants, we consider this to be a high attrition rate. Since the task was designed to not take longer than 15 min to complete, we suspect that one aspect of the task that may have contributed to the attrition rate was that the Finish button is very small in Gorilla, and must be pressed by participants in order for all data to be saved. In an unsupervised task such as this one, it is likely that children or parents simply closed the browser after completing their recordings, without clicking on the Finish button. In the early stages of testing, we noticed the high proportion of “live” participants, and added an extra instruction at the end of the experiment to remind people to “click Finish”. However, we only included this in the text on-screen (“Thank you for sharing your stories today! Please click ‘Finish’ and then you can close your browser window”; see Figure 4) and not in the voice-over, which simply said “Thank you for sharing your stories today!”.

Figure 4:

Screenshot of the “finish” screen in the task, including small red Finish button.

3 Results

After an iterative, primarily bottom-up process of analysis, we centred on six central topics: health, education, family and friends, digital engagement, relationships, and mealtimes and food (Table 1). Apart from mealtimes and food, which for everyone was unanimously positive (although it was also the topic with the fewest mentions), the remaining five topics cut equally across both positive and negative (the “good” and the “not so good”) experiences. We note that many of the utterances were able to be coded across several topics and they were not mutually exclusive, but for the purpose of presentation, we include just one topic per utterance in Table 1.

We then focused our analysis on the children’s initial responses to the question prompts and their discourse organization and management strategies, including filled pauses (Swerts 1998), and as an utterance-initial topic transition marker, repair (Schegloff et al. 1977), false starts, and their use of the discourse marker like for sequentially organizing and maintaining flow in their talk (D’Arcy 2017; Degand et al. 2013); see Table 2 for examples.

Overall, in response to the “not so good” things about having to stay at home all the time, participants most frequently mentioned not seeing friends and extended family, not going to school or childcare, and being bullied by classmates during online learning. We note that although children’s reflections indicated that they were aware of COVID-19 and its dangers, they did not appear to be feeling afraid or unsafe. The “good” things included getting to have cooked lunches at home, spending more time with family and siblings, going on morning walks and bear hunts in their neighbourhoods, and home exercise opportunities such as trampolining. In terms of discourse strategies, children were highly engaged in the task of narrating their experiences, and they responded well to the idea that an interlocutor was present, using floor holder and topic transition markers (e.g., and also), as they would in a normal, everyday conversation. They also used focus markers such as like to emphasize certain points in their narrative, such as going on a bush walk or to the pool (Table 2). This allowed them to voice their own, localized concerns with an imagined interlocutor, even when that interlocutor was not giving them the conversational feedback and responses they might normally expect. This finding was encouraging, as it showed the strengths of this mode of data collection in eliciting conversational data, despite no interlocutor being present.

4 Discussion and closing considerations

Bear in a Window was a unique opportunity to capture children’s voices during an unprecedented time in world history. The capturing and sharing of these voices have important implications for how children’s perspectives are included in our collective memory. We believe that the process itself had a therapeutic effect, as providing children with the opportunity to weigh up both the positives and negatives of life in lockdown promoted a sense of perspective, leading to more positive health and well-being. We believe we have contributed to a body of important literature, such as Clark et al. (2016), where people are invited to share their experiences of traumatic events.

Bear in a Window belongs to a first wave of projects run entirely online (see Sneller 2022), joining, for example, the MI Diaries project, which invites participants to share audio diaries of life in Michigan via an app, including aspects of life during the pandemic (Sneller et al. 2022), and the Lothian Diary Project, which investigated how the COVID-19 lockdown changed the lives people in Edinburgh and the Lothians in Scotland (Hall-Lew et al. 2022). All three projects are unique in that they elicit data without a researcher, interviewer, or interlocutor present. In other words, they guide respondents to self-record data which is subsequently used by researchers. This method has the potential to be powerful in the future of linguistic data collection, or in other social sciences, and initial findings in terms of audio quality and content have been promising.

We note that while one drawback of our project was the small number of participants, neither the Lothian Diary nor the MI Diaries projects had this problem, with the former having recorded 195 participants and the latter over 150 diarists at the time of writing. Reasons for this may be that the Lothian Diaries Project had high public visibility, including at an in-person Festival of Social Sciences (Hall-Lew et al. 2022), and the MI Diaries project had legitimacy and visibility through the availability of its app through app stores. The MI Diaries project also reported recruitment success in specific online spaces, such as Reddit and university listservs, rather than via social media more generally (Sneller et al. 2022).

In terms of method, we note that our project had its challenges. This was unsupervised research, and we observed a higher propensity not just for dropout or attrition, but also misunderstanding of instructions, and mixed quality recordings (this was also observed in the Lothian Diary Project when participants recorded themselves outdoors). Naturally, this was expected in wholly online data collection, but normally, we would expect the benefit of higher participant numbers (due to the accessibility of the task, without having to come onto, e.g., a university campus to take part in the research) to outweigh the drawbacks of attrition rates. However, in our case, we experienced both low participation rates and high attrition rates. To try to understand this trend, we garnered informal feedback from some participants, and from other colleagues who use Gorilla, and we suspect that the following deterrents may have been at play:

1. Gorilla is not mobile-friendly. To complete the task, participants had to switch to using a desktop, laptop, or tablet. This creates an extra hurdle, as we suspect many of the parents heard about the project on social media, which is often or even exclusively accessed via people’s mobile phones. The MI Diaries project (Sneller et al. 2022), for example, used a mobile app, which proved to be easily accessible for participants without compromising on sound quality (see also Freeman and De Decker 2021). Having a mobile app downloadable on app stores also gave legitimacy and authenticity to the project and its visual branding (Sneller et al. 2022).

2. There was no participant payment or incentive offered. Since this was a small-scale project with limited funding, we were not in a position to offer an incentive; however, this could have encouraged more people to participate. The MI Diaries (Sneller et al. 2022) and Lothian Diary (Hall-Lew et al. 2022) projects offered compensation: a USD 5 gift card per 15 min of recording for the former, and for the latter GBP 15 for each standard contribution and GBP 20 for each contribution from someone unhoused or otherwise vulnerable. It is noteworthy that both of these projects offered alternative options to simple cash payment. In the MI Diaries project, participants could also choose to “pay forward” their payment to someone else; and in the Lothian Diary Project, participants could choose a gift card to a local business or a donation to a local charity.

3. There was no “hard deadline” for the project, meaning that even people with intentions to participate may have simply put it off, thinking they could complete it at any time.

4. Participants may have believed that the experiment was finished once they had completed their second recording, and simply closed the browser, rather than clicking the important (but not so visible) Finish button. The fact that parents had to act as ad hoc research assistants, making sure their children completed the required steps, may also have been at odds with our instructions for parents to step away from the device once their children were ready to start their recordings.

In terms of future steps, we plan to collect more data for the project, perhaps in a supervised or semi-supervised fashion, and with an offer of payment or reward. Recent projects utilizing a semi-supervised protocol, where participants take part at home on their own device, but are guided through the task on Zoom by a research assistant, have had high rates of participation and completion, with participants reporting similar experiences of participation as compared to face-to-face data collection (see Leemann et al. 2020). With more data, we plan to expand our analysis of discourse strategies, focussing on topic markers, adjacency pairs, and (where applicable) narrative development. We also hope to be able to examine age and potential gender-based differences with a larger sample. The present analysis, while exploratory, has provided us with the opportunity to reflect on the benefits and drawbacks of remote data collection. We expect this kind of research to remain an option for many scholars beyond the pandemic and we envisage more papers on best practice in this area to emerge in the years to come.

As our own database expands, we will work towards creating a publicly accessible database and work with two museums to curate a collection of children’s voices of life in lockdown. Our findings have the potential to be of interest and further application to researchers across different disciplines, including linguistics and language development, education, speech sciences and technology, psychological sciences, health and wellbeing, and language variation and change, including documenting and exploring Australian children’s spoken English, and examining how language change spreads within a community and across generations.