The collection of narratives on face mask wearing written by members of scholarly association Navigating Knowledge Landscapes Network in May 2020
Description
The data collected in this dataset are narratives exploring public policies, attitudes, individual behaviors, and the collective experiences of the affected communities regarding face mask wearing at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The narratives were written by the members of the interdisciplinary research network Navigating Knowledge Landscapes (NKL; http://knowledge-landscapes.hiim.hr/). The members of the network are scholars belonging to different research disciplines and the aim of the network is to explore and discuss the individual aspects of citizens’ navigation of (new) knowledge in the digital society. An invitation to participate in this study was sent to 97 members of the network on May 11, 2020, the written responses in the form of narratives were collected until May 26, 2020. In total, 29 scholars from 22 countries responded by providing their narratives, all of them collected in this dataset. The authors belong to 9 different academic disciplines with majority of them having background in Life Sciences, Sociology, Philosophy and Medicine. The authors described in their narratives the use of face masks in their countries according to their subjective point of view, and/or how people from their social environment perceive it. The participants were asked to answer the following questions in their narratives: • Part 1: What are the rules adopted in your country about face mask wearing? What would be the overall approach for use of the face masks in your community (government instructions, availability, the citizen compliance)? • Part 2: What is your individual/personal attitude and practice in relation to face masks? If applicable, start with good practice and end with what you consider to be mistakes. • Part 3: How do you judge the behavior of people you encounter? Face masks (or no face masks) and interpersonal interactions. Again, start with positive and end with negative. • Part 4 (optional): free to say whatever you think is important to the practices of your community in relation to face masks. Although standard questions were asked, we let scholars to answer them in open-ended text. No corrections or modifications were applied to the narratives, including no proofreading or grammatical checks. The authors agreed that their narratives can be published under their full name and affiliation, and the resulting collection used for research purposes. Ethical approval for this study was obtained from The University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK and the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Croatian Studies, Croatia.