Frequency and Timing of Depression and Anxiety Diagnoses Following Cancer Diagnosis: A Multi-Center Cohort Study.

In times of disruptive events that can trigger dramatic social change, such as a major natural disaster, a political crisis, or a pandemic, the role of governments is central. Governments need to implement policies quickly to protect their citizens and maintain social cohesion (Razavi et al. ). Such public policies often involve competing collective goals that are directly linked to different fundamental individual needs, especially safety and well‐being. This was especially true in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic. To limit the spread of the virus and deaths, governments requested that citizens comply with challenging measures such as staying at home, physical distancing, and wearing face masks. Adjusting these measures as the pandemic evolved and as new scientific knowledge about COVID‐19 emerged often came at the expense of individuals’ and communities’ well‐being and challenged social cohesion. In line with sociological conceptualizations and recent advances in social science research (Fonseca et al. ; Friedkin ; Mekoa and Busari ; Moustakas ; Riazi et al. ), we define social cohesion as a relational property of communities: the extent to which individuals feel connected to one another, share a sense of belonging, and are able to cooperate toward common goals across social differences. There is now a broad scientific consensus that the COVID‐19 pandemic and related public health measures affected multiple dimensions of social cohesion. Research documents changes in attitudes toward public measures and engagement in recommended behaviours (Wang et al. ), well‐being (American Psychological Association ; The Conference Board of Canada and The Mental Health Commission of Canada ; Vindegaard and Benros ), and acceptance of diversity (Croucher et al. ; Ferrante et al. ; Jeung and Nham ). Sociological work has also framed the pandemic as a profound disruption to social cohesion, with implications for solidarity, social and institutional trust, inequality, social integration, and community life (Larsen et al. ; Ware ). However, less is known about how citizens perceived the normative context created by government pandemic measures and how these perceptions were associated with social cohesion. It also remains unclear whether variation in perceived normative context is linked to higher or lower levels of social cohesion. In our research, we argue that perceptions of the normative context surrounding governmental COVID‐19 measures are central to social cohesion in times of dramatic social change. These perceptions shape how citizens evaluate government measures, whether they see related behaviours as legitimate and collectively shared, and how they assess the broader social environment, including well‐being and acceptance of diversity. This argument builds on the sociological insight that public authority and institutions shape the normative environment within which citizens interpret collective obligations and assess whether others are also participating (Bailey and Norbury ; Borkowska and Laurence ; Kye and Hwang ). For example, a longitudinal study conducted in the U.S. (Tankard and Paluck ) showed that a Supreme Court ruling in favour of gay marriage shifted the perception of majority support in favour of gay marriage and gay people (see also Ofosu et al. ). This finding is consistent with a broader sociological understanding of social cohesion as involving both vertical relations between citizens and institutions and horizontal relations between citizens (Chan et al. ; Jenson ). Based on the scientific literature in sociology (Chan et al. ; Forrest and Kearns ; Maass and Lillefjell ), political science (Bailey and Norbury ; Candel and Biesbroek ; Katz et al. ) and psychology (de la Sablonnière et al. ; McAdams ) we argue that, in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, three ingredients are central to a normative context associated with social cohesion: (1) clarity, or the perceived clarity of governmental measures, (2) coherence, or the perceived consistency of governmental measures, and (3) majority support, or the perception that most citizens support or comply with these measures.