Italian University Students facing Distance Learning: the Results of a Panel Web Survey

The proposed paper centers on a segment of data taken from a broader study on the social effects of the pandemic (Lombardo & Mauceri, eds., 2020), focusing on the sub-sample of university students. Said study involved widespread sharing of the questionnaire link on the Net, reaching 13.473 cases over 4 weeks of data collection (including 3,013 students in Distance Learning programs, of which 1,741 are university students placed in three-year, master’s or post-graduate degree courses). This survey was envisaged as a panel web survey, with the intent of recording budding phenomena and capturing, in a diachronic perspective, the evolution of those phenomena under analysis with the same interviewees. One year later, the research team tried to piece together the “balance” of interviewees with respect to numerous areas, among which school stands out. The intent herein is that of presenting the emerging Distance Learning adaptation profiles of the interviewed university students, with particular regard to factors connected to declining performance, digital inequalities, cognitive-emotional distress, forms of marginalization-exclusion, while also, however, trying to highlight the strengths and opportunities inherent to the social transformations underway.