Qualitative Psychology, Vol 13(2), Jun 2026, 261-279; doi:10.1037/qup0000350
Interventions to address the COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted people’s ability to gather. Denmark was early to lockdown society in March 2020. Yet by 2021, successful programs of mass testing and vaccination, and high levels of behavioral compliance, encouraged governments to begin reopening society; and for the first time in over a year people could gather in progressively larger groups. These interventions into everyday life can be seen as a purposive form of “world-making” in which government sought to both protect and then reform Danish society in collaboration with the perceived wishes of the people. Between August and October 2021, as the government cautiously reopened society, we conducted field social psychological research, including in-depth participant observation and in situ interviews with 204 individuals, at 10 cultural events held in Denmark. Congruent with previous quantitative work in this context (Morton & Power, 2022, 2024), our thematic analysis illustrates the ways in which generalized trust in others led to the potential for people to gather in crowds (Theme 1). A discourse analysis (on Theme 2) further reveals the ways in which crowd participants negotiated the ambivalence between felt and actual safety and how they made decisions to participate in crowd events in uncertain times. Finally, shared identity with trusted others underpins the phenomenological accounts of the joy of crowd participation (Theme 3). We end by discussing how multiple qualitative analytic methods can be fruitfully used in conjunction to develop insight; the implications of this insight for theories of crowd psychology; and how field social psychology is a generative framework for examining—and contributing to—world-making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)