How the COVID-19 Pandemic Changed Adolescents’ Use of Technologies, Sense of Community, and Loneliness: A Retrospective Perception Analysis

HIGHLIGHTS: The pandemic has massively exacerbated the sense of loneliness of high-school students, especially of young women. The pandemic has changed the use of technology by high-school students for social, information, leisure, and educational purposes. Young women changed their use of technology more than young men to stay in touch with their family and for information seeking and study purposes. High-school students’ sense of community has undergone modest variations due to the pandemic. ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic has brought important changes to how we engage in relationships of any kind. To combat the spread of the virus, schools resorted to remote-learning, and teenagers had to rely on various technologies to meet many of the needs that they used to satisfy offline (e.g., social, informational, and recreational/leisure purposes). This article was written to investigate the changes that the students at an Italian high school went through in terms of use of technologies, loneliness, and sense of community, through a survey focusing on their retrospective perceptions. The study was carried out on 917 students. In general, we have found that the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly increased the perception of loneliness in teenagers (especially in female respondents), as well as their use of technologies for social, informational, and leisure purposes. However, maybe thanks to the opportunities provided by ICTs and remote learning, the sense of community in Italian teenagers was only marginally impacted.