ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the impact of COVID-19 on the private sphere of the respondents, focusing on how they actually coped with all the issues deriving from the disease during the second phase of the pandemic emergency. The Protective Action Decision Making (PADM) model is the theoretical framework under which the analysis has been carried out, along with the concept of ontological insecurity put forward by Giddens, here interpreted as people’s confidence in being able to produce and sustain a shared understanding of reality. Results show that there are three main sets of factors that influenced whether individuals adopted mechanisms to protect themselves and their relatives from the risk of infection: People’s experience with COVID-19, the social behaviors adopted during the second phase of the pandemic in Italy, and respondents’ cultural worldviews, operationalized here as principles (such as egalitarianism, hierarchism, fatalism, and individualism) and identities (political, religious, family, and professional). All of these factors were combined with a sequential multivariate analysis procedure (first, multiple correspondence analysis, then cluster analysis) in order to create three groups of people, each representing a different risk profile.
