Social Interactions and Relationships: Covid-19 Pandemic and the Emergence of the New Normal During the Lockdown in Universities in Nigeria

Abstract

It is well known that as a reaction to the pandemic, governments initiated restrictions of movements and imposed a lockdown within every home in the world as a necessary step towards controlling the infection rate. This action of separation of people from one another, known as social distancing has had far-reaching repercussions for the social life of Nigerians as it was regarded as a strange intrusion into social interactions and relationships. This research examines students' feelings on the forced distancing measures and online/offline relationships under the lockdown. It generates data from questionnaires. Simple percentage was used to analyse the data while Pearson Chi-Square was used to test a hypothesis. The study revealed that a majority of the students (60.7%) were not satisfied with the lockdown while some of them (47.7%) were not satisfied with the online relationships. However, the absolute majority of respondents (80.1%) considered online relationships the best form of social interactions. The results show that COVID-19 lockdown is not a significant predictor of online relationship satisfaction.