Social Investigation Report
Since last November, the Hi Neighbors team has been collecting information about the impacts of COVID-19 from the residents of Flushing via surveys and street interviews. The following is a brief summary of our findings.
Our usable quantitative data is limited. We created one larger online survey and translated it from English into Mandarin, Korean, and Spanish. The majority of respondents were English speakers, and additional street interviews were conducted in local parks in Mandarin. We had 29 combined respondents.
Of those who responded, the biggest concern across all eight categories (Child care, Eldercare, Job search, Food, Health, Utility, and Housing) was “Job Search.” This does not include “none of the above” and “other.” The second and third most communicated areas of concern were eldercare and health.
In our in-person interviews, more than half of all respondents noted that most of the time these larger categories were intrinsically tied to their mental health and wellbeing. Those who were older, or who was caring for an older member of the household, found it difficult to go outside for short walks or exercise outdoors which was generally their way of maintaining a healthy lifestyle and a regular social scene, meeting with friends often for walks in the neighborhood. These situations both directly and indirectly branched into feelings of depression and partial physical degradation over time.
This thread of mental health seemed to open up a whole new topic of study for the team, and one that will be further explored in 2021.
Our limitations in an online survey were in visualization. We weren’t able to correlate and connect topics that inherently go together. For instance, within elder care comes concern for mental health but also family visits, grocery shopping, and physical health and wellness. Being able to unpack each person’s individual story is near impossible without a qualitative interview.
A few categories that were mentioned occasionally were that of food security, child care, utilities, and housing. Common feedback from those interviewed was not that these areas were nonexistent prior to the onset of the pandemic, but that the pandemic itself had exacerbated needs, especially as some members of the community noted feeling additional discrimination as COVID-19 was being called the “China virus” at onset. This paired with the fact that the majority of folks had jobs related to the food and beverage or service industry meant that they were at risk of losing their income and additional questions of immigration status could possibly be raised if they needed to apply for benefits to make it by.
With that being said, it was a relief that in this small group of respondents, four of them felt that their lives did not change dramatically and two of them were not currently working and were able to collect government subsidies during this time. These respondents were over 45 and noted that they now had extra time to do things they weren’t able to in regular business hours and on workdays and now they could explore new hobbies or work to volunteer more with the community — of course with masks and gloves on.
