Feeling Uncertain During Lockdown: Exploring Emotional Experience among Adolescents amidst Covid-19

Abstract

Abstract An outbreak of global pandemic influences adolescents’ emotional well-being and contributes to psychosocial conflict. Detecting adolescents’ emotion when they stay at home during Pandemic COVID-19 may be helpful to better understand their well-being. Therefore, the current study aimed to explore adolescents' emotional well-being in the midst of the outbreak. This study employs a qualitative method for participants’ interview (n=30) among adolescents from low -income households. This study was conducted for six weeks during the midst of the outbreak. The qualitative data were collected via online based on focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews. The results reveal that boredom, anxiety and hope were the main emotions faced by the adolescents’ in the midst of the outbreak. This finding explains that they were extremely bored repeating the same routines and not being able to interact with their friends physically. Alongside, they felt anxious about learning progress that may affect their academic performance, uncertain pandemic COVID-19 situation and family’s economic crisis. The adolescents also illustrated a green shoot of hope to return to school and that the number of pandemic cases will be rapidly reduced. Overall study emphasizes that emotions are important factors that can be addressed in order to prevent emotional fatigue and mental health problems that affect adolescents’ social well-being. This study hints at a novel research area for psychologists to develop emotional preparedness strategies for adolescents to help parents and teachers in order to improve emotional management skills at home. Future research should comprehensively measure the impact of emotion and its relation to behavioral problem during outbreaks.