Social Implications of Digitalization of Professional and Private Life in Poland: Between Convenience and Trust

Digitalization, defined as the increased utilization of digital technologies, is included in the European Union's development strategy. It is one of the top priorities on the list of development goals, which were gradually implemented before the COVID-19 pandemic. The outbreak of the global epidemic crisis in 2020 and its long-term course strengthened this process. It concerned the professional environment, including remote work and various types of hybrid solutions, as well as personal context. Video and text communication, email, and messaging apps began to play a more significant role. The proposed paper will aim to analyze the social consequences of the intensification of such digital practices in work and private life based on two types of empirical evidence: the ESS Round 10 rotating module "Digital Social Contacts in Work and Family Life" (2020-2022) and the interview-based qualitative longitudinal study "The social implications of the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland" (n=356) conducted in three waves over the same period. Attention will be focused on the Polish context, where, in the light of ESS data, digital social contacts were very positively viewed among respondents as solutions facilitating the management of activities and simultaneously had the lowest level of perceived risk that professional work and private life would interfere with each other. The juxtaposition of quantitative results with a qualitative longitudinal dataset allowed us to (1) reconstruct the spectrum of meanings behind the trust in progressive digitization, (2) uncover the range of consequences of digitization on job satisfaction and relationship quality, and (3) highlight the importance of the stage of the dynamic process, such as the pandemic, on the perception of the analyzed phenomena.