Features of Communication of People Living Together during the Period of Self-isolation

Introduction. The article analyzes the impact of forced self-isolation in connection with the coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020 on communication between people living together. The relevance of the topic, in addition to the current situation in society, is determined by the fact that interpersonal communication is a factor that has a great influence on the quality of relations between people, and therefore on the psychological stability of each individual.

The purpose of the article is to find out how the self-isolation regime affected the communication between people living together.

Methodology and sources. The current situation in modern society actualizes the value of using methods of analysis and management of communicative behavior in the practice of interpersonal communications, such as Nonviolent Communication by M. Rosenberg, Transactional Analysis by E. Berne, Neuro-Linguistic Programming. They were used by the author of the article as a source to identify the key problems of interpersonal communication during self-isolation.

Results and discussion. To solve the problems of the study, we conducted a survey, in which 217 respondents took part. Guided by the task to describe as accurately as possible the nature of changes in communication between people living together, the author included different groups of questions in the questionnaire. The first group is aimed at assessing communication as a whole through an attempt to look at it from the outside. Further, the respondent was asked to recall the difficulties and positive changes brought to communication by a new way of life and, possibly, by an emotional state. The next two questions were devoted to tense and conflict situations: the respondent was asked to evaluate the changes in their number, and then, in the open-ended question, write how the ways of solving such situations during self-isolation have changed. Two more questions were aimed at assessing changes in the communicative behavior of cohabitants and their own. In the last, also open-ended question, the author was interested in the general nature of changes in communication with family and friends with whom the respondent does not live together.

Conclusion. The study confirmed the author’s assumption that there were significant changes in the communication between people living together during the period of forced self-isolation in the spring of 2020.

During the study period, there were more tense and conflict situations in communication between cohabitants, which made the search for new communication strategies and techniques to preserve the psychological stability of interpersonal relations.

Many respondents noted the positive impact of the period of self-isolation on their relationships with people living with them. Among the difficulties, the most common were communication fatigue, difficulty in expressing their emotions, self-disclosure, and an increase in the number of conflicts.

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