New publication on moral language in Swiss COVID-19 discourse
A new article by Frank Fritschi, Giovanni Spitale, Federico Germani, Nikola Biller-Andorno and Sonja Merten, published in Critical Public Health, examines how moral language shaped Swiss public discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study, titled “Moral contentions in the COVID-19 discourses: a qualitative content analysis of Moral Key Terms in Swiss public discourses,” analyses newspaper articles, social media posts, and responses collected through the online platform PubliCo. Using a theory-driven qualitative content analysis, the authors show how Moral Key Terms were used to challenge or support pandemic management efforts.
The article identifies four central areas of moral contention: how democratic decisions are legitimately formed, how safety and freedom should be balanced, how dialogue can be fostered, and how social justice can be achieved during a pandemic. These different uses of moral terms reflect the life worlds, perspectives, and interests of different social groups.
The publication is part of the SNSF NRP80 project “Boosting public discourse: Public communication as a tool to deal with communicative inequalities during health crises.”