Social Sciences Research Methods Regarding COVID-19 Pandemic. A PRISMA Systematic Review

Abstract

In the digital society, the traditional methods of social research for the study of so-ciety have been accompanied by innovative methodological proposals: digital and digitized methods , which are now applied to many themes. In 2020 the most de-bated topic was certainly the one concerning the Covid-19 pandemic; a “total social fact” of which not only the medical aspects have been analyzed, a substantial scien-tific production, indeed, has concerned the impacts that the pandemic itself and the measures that governments have taken to resist it has had on society. Starting from these considerations, the aim of this work is to offer an overview of the topics ana-lyzed and the research methods used to investigate this disruptive event in academ-ic research concerning the social sciences - and in particular that which focused on the Italian case - during the last year. To map the state of the art, consolidate the heterogeneous corpus of knowledge, and investigate the different methodological approaches used (tradition/digital/digitized) a methodological approach was ap-plied based on a systematic review of the literature conducted with the PRISMA method and carried out with a third type content analysis