The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally, the unusual conditions of the pandemic—unlike other crises—have impacted almost every facet of our lives. The pandemic has deepened existing inequalities and created new vulnerabilities related to social isolation, incarceration, involuntary exclusion from the labor market, diminished economic opportunity, life-and-death risk in the workplace, and a host of emergent digital, emotional, and economic divides. In tandem, many less advantaged individuals and groups have suffered disproportionate hardship related to the pandemic in the form of fear and anxiety, exposure to misinformation, and the effects of the politicization of the crisis. Many of these phenomena will have a long tail that we are only beginning to understand. Nonetheless, the research also offers evidence of resilience on several fronts including nimble organizational response, emergent communication practices, spontaneous solidarity, and the power of hope. While we do not know what the post COVID-19 world will look like, the scholarship here tells us that the virus has not exhausted society’s adaptive potential.

Drawing on 50 in-depth semistructured interviews with primary caregivers of at least one child diagnosed with autism, this study demonstrates how the current social experience of caring for a child with an ambiguous and invisible disorder upsets the identities of primary caregivers and challenges their ability to perform the traditional Standard North American Family ideal and normative ways of “doing family.” Accordingly, I employ a narrative framework to (a) understand deeply how everyday autism care work affects family life, caregivers’ identities, and feelings of family marginalization and (b) investigate how symbolic resources, like support groups, can provide a space to reorient and transform ideas and practices of family and caregiver identity. Through their intensified care work and psychosocial experiences on the autism journey, caregivers demonstrate how they understand, negotiate, and redefine identities and dominant ideas of family in complex and fluid ways.

Using a social diagnosis approach to COVID-19-related trauma, this research bridges the fields of sociology of medicine, disaster response, digital sociology, and digital divides. Bringing these literatures into dialogue, we problematize the digitally mediated trauma ensuing from COVID-19. We unpack two emergent media pathways or channels to a social diagnosis of trauma specific to sharp increase in reliance on digital media occasioned by the pandemic. The research advances the theoretical concept of the digital media trauma paradox in which trauma ensues from both oversaturation from toxic digital content and exclusion from digital resources. In either case, digital media engagements may act as a social determinant of health, particularly digital inequalities to co-occur with other forms of disadvantage. The research closes by arguing that social diagnosis approaches are an excellent tool to understand the complexities of disaster response in the digital age.

Analyzing diverse and rich data on the COVID-19 pandemic, this issue of the American Behavioral Scientist offers important insights into health and risk assessment in a time of unprecedented crisis in the 21st century. This issue explores health, emotions, and well-being vis-à-vis the pandemic and its societal impacts. Across the articles, we see the complex ways that this global health crisis has consequences for individuals and groups as they engage in risk assessment and grapple with the secondary effects of the pandemic. Within this issue, we observe the importance of information exchange, networks and relationships, emotional and economic well-being, and risk perception. All of these phenomena converge in the myriad ways that the COVID-19 pandemic forces people to reevaluate everyday activities in consequential life realms. As the issue as a whole illuminates, human emotions and risk assessment are powerful forces that prompt practices and behaviors even in a time of public health crisis.

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