Communicating information during Covid-19 : Analysing strategic communication in a Swedish institution

Sammanfattning: On 11 March 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) proclaimed the corona outbreak to be a pandemic, and on the same day, the first Swede, a person in his upper 70s, died of Covid-19. The Covid-19 pandemic had a significant impact on school settings and affected higher education globally. Students faced sudden changes to their lives and relied upon written messages for directives.  This study investigated Uppsala University in Sweden as a case study. The purpose of this study was twofold: to examine strategic communication by Uppsala University aimed at students during the Covid-19 crisis, and to investigate the way the students at the university perceived and made sense of this crisis communication. The study was conducted when the pandemic was still ongoing and specifically focused on communication and perceptions during the time of November 2020 until the end of April 2021.  The study relies on the concept of sticky crises. It has further used Coomb’s Situational Crisis Communication Theory based on Attribution Theory in order to analyze crisis communication. This has been used in combination with Reception Theory in order to evaluate how students have decoded messages.  This study claims Uppsala University has been using a varied crisis communication strategy. However, there has been a gap between certain messages (adjusting information) and students. This gap is due to three different reasons: the nature of the complex crisis, the decentralized institution, and because not enough messages have combined different message strategies when communicating and mostly just focused on instructing information.