Public health guideline compliance and perceived government effectiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada: Findings from a longitudinal cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has imposed enormous adversity worldwide. Public health guidelines have been a first line of defense but rely on compliance with evolving recommendations and restrictions. This study sought to characterize adherence to and perceptions of public health guidelines over a one-year timeframe during the pandemic. METHODS: Participants were 1435 community adults in Ontario who completed assessments at five time points (April 2020, July 2020, October 2020, January 2021, and April 2021; 92% retention). Participants were assessed for self-reported adherence to government protocols and perceptions of government response (importance, compliance, and effectiveness). Analyses used general linear mixed-effects modelling of overall changes by time and examined differences based on age and sex. FINDINGS: Over time, participants reported high or increasing behavioural engagement in public health guidelines, including physical distancing, restricting activity, and masking. In contrast, participants exhibited significant reductions in perceived importance and compliance, with evidence of more negative changes in younger participants. The largest changes were a substantial reduction in perceived government effectiveness, from predominantly positive perceptions to predominantly negative perceptions. INTERPRETATION: These results illuminate evolving trends in public health compliance and perceptions over the course of the pandemic in Canada, revealing the malleability of public perceptions of public health recommendations and government effectiveness. FUNDING: This research was funded by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). CIHR had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, interpretation, or writing of the report.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".