Number of the month January 2021

29 percent helpful neighbors during the pandemic

At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, many expected that the importance of mutual assistance among neighbors and of neighborly relations in general would increase. Whether this has happened cannot yet be definitively determined. However, initial statistical data is available for the first wave of the pandemic: 29 percent of Germans provided concrete help to their neighbors.

Shopping for neighbors and conversations were cited as the most frequent forms of mutual assistance. These and other figures come from opinion polls conducted in 2020 by EDEKA in cooperation with two market research institutes. The observed willingness to help differs only slightly from the results of a YouGov study published at the beginning of the pandemic. In that study, 31 percent of respondents – regardless of the pandemic – stated that they at least occasionally do favors for their neighbors, and 70 percent rated their relationship with their neighbors as good or very good overall.

According to the "EDEKA Neighborhood Barometer 2020," at least 15 percent of respondents believed that their relationship with their neighbors would become more intense in the long term as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. However, 24 percent of those surveyed, including a particularly high number of older people, also reported having less or even significantly less contact with their neighbors.

Photo: © bluebudgie/Pixabay.com