Collective Anxieties of Canadians During The COVID-19 Pandemic: The Angst-Free and Anxious Population Segments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 Pandemic in Canada represents a very troubling period as individuals confront a powerful "invisible" enemy killer in the form of the COVID-19 virus. This historical juncture is important to analyze because it constitutes a moment where collective anxieties become widespread and collective resources are mobilized to address them. Using market segmentation analysis, the purpose of the study is to produce a portrait of collective anxieties, paying special attention to the typical population segments in the Canadian population differentiated by their particular concerns about health and social conditions in the country and the world. The study used as its data source a survey sample of 4,600 adult Canadians aged 15 years old and over during the confinement period of March 29 2020 to April 3 2020 and collected by Statistics Canada. Attitudinal domain items (12 in total) included concerns about personal and household health, the health system, the ability to cooperate and support during and after the crisis, family stress and others. A market segmentation analysis using Principal Components and k-means cluster analysis of these domain items revealed the presence of six major population segments: Health Conditions Anxious (13%), Health System Overload Anxious (26%), Angst-Free (23%), Inner-Bubble Conditions Anxious (12%), Outer-Bubble Conditions Anxious (25%) and World Conditions Anxious (1%). The segment mottos were as follows: "Glad I Have A Health Card!", "How Many Beds Do We Have?", "I'm Not Worried!, "My Bubble May Be In Trouble!", "Other Bubbles May Be In Trouble! and "It’s the End of the World As We Know It!”. Inner-Bubble Conditions Anxious members displayed the higher average scores of collective anxiety and Angst-Free members, the lowest. Market segmentation is a useful tool for decision makers to categorize population members by their typical attitudinal traits and, by doing so, facilitate better public campaigns, help design messages, and implement changes that can promote more efficient ways to deal with the various psychosocial consequences of the COVID-19 confinement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".