Changes in the social situation in EU countries during COVID‐19 (an alternative approach to the assessment of social indicators)

Abstract

AbstractThis contribution focuses on research on the social impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic, more specifically on unemployment, income, and poverty in 2020. The indicators selected to measure these phenomena are suitable for understanding and explaining social changes related to and linked to the COVID‐19 pandemic, and represent scientifically reliable, verified, and suitable indicators for evaluating and monitoring the differentiated impact and impacts of the pandemic on individual EU countries. The goal of the paper was to determine how the pandemic—or measures against the spread of the virus—affected the targeted social phenomena. The boxplot method was used to capture the dynamics of changes in the values of selected indicators, and the synthetic variable construction method was used to classify countries’ overall vulnerability/resilience. The results of the ordered country classification explicitly showed the significantly differentiated impacts of the pandemic on the observed phenomena and the changes in the overall social situation in individual countries.