The VolkswagenStiftung funds a project proposal on “Corona Crisis and Beyond - Perspectives for Science, Scholarship and Society” by Martin Kroh and his research group. Additionally, the project proposal on “Double Fragility: The Care Crisis in the Corona Crisis” by Alexandra Scheele is also funded.

"Corona Crisis and Beyond – Perspectives for Science, Scholarship and Society" studies interpersonal trust during the corona pandemic. Previous research suggests that interpersonal trust may constitute an important factor of the public response to the spread of Sars-CoV-2 and may at the same time be modified by the pandemic. Martin Kroh and his team draw on unique data of the SOEP-CoV study, a survey conducted between March 2020 and January 2021 in households of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), one of the internationally leading household panel surveys. They  focus both on immediate as well as long-term effects of the pandemic on interpersonal trust and thus potentials for social cooperation during the crises.

The project “Double Fragility: The Care Crisis in the Corona Crisis” by Alexandra Scheele and Nadja Bergmann (L&R Sozialforschung, Vienna) and Helene Schiffbänker (Joanneum Research, Vienna) will investigate how parents in so-called system-relevant jobs requiring on-site deployment have organised childcare during the lockdown of childcare institutions. The research group follows the assumption that the corona crisis not only revealed an already existing structural crisis in childcare, but also created a double fragility for parents with caring responsibilities. Scheele, Bergmann and Schiffbänker will use the concept of antifragility to develop perspectives for a more resilient childcare system in the future. The qualitative study will collect data from Germany and Austria and thus allow a comparison of the impact of similar, but in detail divergent policies in place.