Hegemonic Struggle and the Swiss COVID-19 Discourse: Empowering the Swiss Youth in their Participation in the Public Discourse

This dissertation will answer the question of how it is possible to design a gamified intervention that will strengthen the critical moral reasoning skills of Swiss youth when they are engaging in public health discourses. This research is embedded in the National Research Project 80 called “Boosting Public Discourse: Towards a Targeted, Evidence-Based Strategy to Improve Moral Reasoning”. This project aims to establish how the public in general uses moral key terms in relation to COVID-19 in general, and Swiss youth (i.e. between 15 and 19 years old) in particular uses them and then devise a gamified intervention to strengthen the moral reasoning skills of Swiss youth.

Policies, perceptions and practices regarding COVID-19 are shaped by the public discourse on the pandemic. The approach of this research is based on Gramscian theory. My first paper will be a Critical Discourse Analysis of the datasets 1-4 of our NRP 80 project: public press releases, media articles, social media and the responses from PubliCo. I will focus on where in the Swiss public COVID-19 discourse some perspectives dominate while other perspectives are marginalized.

To refine and gear our gamified intervention better to our target audience of Swiss youth, I will write two papers on Swiss youth and Swiss male recruits. My second paper is an analysis how the broader discourse on COVID-19 is reflected in the vaccination decision making process of male Swiss recruits aged 18-25 functioning as a proxy for young Swiss male adults in general. This will be based on a qualitative content analysis of our datasets 1-4 to understand the Swiss public discourse on COVID-19 and a dataset consisting of interviews and focus group discussions with Swiss recruits. For my third paper I will conduct peer to peer interviews with Swiss youth aged 15-19, based on body mapping, an arts based interviewing method whereby participants visualize their answers on an outline of their body and subsequently explain their map. This data will be analyzed through latent content analysis.

Gamification, and with it, gamified interventions, have an ambivalent relation to societal hierarchies, as they can be used as forms of intensified social control. To decide, whether a gamified intervention to be empowering as well as conducive to empathy, critical thinking and moral reasoning skills qualitative criteria, I will establish qualitative criteria in the third paper by reviewing the literature and conduct focus group discussions with our participants on how they experienced the intervention.