Social capital, youth and pandemic:

the cases of Curitiba-PR and Florianópolis-SC

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the inequalities faced in Brazil. And when we think about youth, we know that remote classes and the lack of physical spaces for socialization have increased the differences in quality between public and private education. With this, we question: what are the effects of social isolation on the levels of social capital of young people? Our objective is to analyze the levels of social capital of young people before (2016) and after the pandemic (2022), in the cities of Curitiba-PR and Florianópolis-SC. We start from the hypothesis that social isolation further eroded the already low levels of social capital existing among youth. We used the quantitative protocol, analyzing data from research carried out by the Research Center on Latin America (NUPESAL/UFRGS) with young people from public and private high schools, in 2016 and 2022, in the analyzed cities.