Abstract

Sense of community for young people is a feeling of belonging in relation to school or the neigh-borhood. It is a topic that has been extensively studied in the social sciences, even though transfor-mations of this knowledge have not been sufficiently visible. The purpose of this research was to describe perceptions of the sense of community at school and in the neighborhood during COVID-19 among students aged 14 to 18 from public, semi-public and private schools in the Metro-politan Region of Santiago. Using a qualitative, descriptive, and cross-sectional methodology that involved digital photo-stimuli, youth perspectives were analyzed thematically. The results show that young people's sense of community in schools during the pandemic involved strained interpersonal relationships with negative affects emerging. The participating young people highlighted the impor-tance of physical space in relation to their sense of belonging. The young people's sense of commu-nity in the neighborhood was incipient during the pandemic.