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Survey highlights difficulties of researching from home

Lockdown restrictions in Sweden led to reduced data collection and fewer interactions, study shows

The Covid-19 pandemic made data collection more difficult, extended teaching time and reduced informal meetings between Swedish academics, according to a survey.

The survey, undertaken by the Swedish Higher Education Authority (UKÄ), found that half of researchers in the country considered researching from home to be worse or much worse than researching at their workplace. Based on 1,356 responses, the survey found that a quarter of researchers had made many or very many changes to their work—but that not all of these were seen as negative.

Overall, respondents said they were happy to have online meetings and seminars but expressed dissatisfaction with online conferences. Many also said that the lack of physical meetings had had a negative impact on their research, as there was no opportunity to quickly and informally share ideas and thoughts. Another problem was that the lack of social interactions affected researchers’ motivation and creativity. 

The survey found that, generally, women were more positive towards online meetings than men. 

“Digital platforms have made it easier to meet people from around the world than before the pandemic,” one researcher was quoted as saying in the study. “But since the threshold for having an online meeting has vanished, we also invest more time in unnecessary Zoom meetings, in my opinion.”

There was some difference between research fields, with respondents from the social sciences, humanities and arts adapting more easily to working from home. “It has been a wonderful and productive period, and I do not miss the physical presence,” said one social scientist.

Time and targets

However, many others quoted family responsibilities and lack of adequate office space at home as negative influences. For some respondents, this had caused a significant issue around meeting deadlines and targets.

“Since I’m primarily funded through scholarships, this means that I have lost a lot of research time, or I need to conduct the same amount of research in a shorter time,” said one respondent with small children. “I need to use my funding, which is for cost of living regardless of whether I can research or not.”

Another limiting factor quoted in the study was teaching, which, according to the respondents, had extended in both time and scope as universities moved online. For a third of respondents, teaching had taken time from research, meaning they either spent less time on conducting research overall or had to work overtime to make up for hours spent teaching.

“This naturally eats into research or free time and can eventually lead to exhaustion or that research funding being used for teaching,” one respondent said.

UKÄ warned that data collection for science had become considerably more difficult during the pandemic, as libraries and archives had closed and medical and health sciences were hampered by restrictions on patient visits. The natural sciences also suffered from not being able to conduct field trips and experiments, the report stated.

The survey was conducted in March and April, when most of Sweden was still operating under social distancing restrictions to reduce the spread of Covid-19. UKÄ said it would continue to follow the long-term impacts of the pandemic on research.