Contextual and psychological factors of mask-wearing among secondary school students: A cross-sectional survey from Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction After the Ontario government withdrew masking regulations, mask-wearing became a personal choice. Many studies have investigated the factors associated with public mask-wearing, but few have explored the knowledge, attitudes, and psychological factors of masking in high school students. Our study aims to fill this gap. Methods In February 2023, a cross-sectional survey was distributed online to Grade 9-12 students in a school located in Toronto. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and logistic regression were performed on the quantitative data, while thematic analysis was used to evaluate the qualitative responses. Results Most of the 62 participants were male with the median age of 16. Approximately half of the respondents reported some frequency of mask-wearing over the past month. Almost all participants claimed to be knowledgeable about COVID-19’s modes of transmission and preventative measures. More participants supported voluntary masking in schools rather than mandated masking. Demographic variables, existing COVID-19 knowledge, and perceived medical benefits were not significantly correlated with masking behaviour. Students who supported voluntary masking were ∼22 times more likely to wear a mask compared to those who held negative attitudes. Participants who felt a high level of perceived barriers were ∼30 times less likely to wear a mask. Mask-wearing individuals cited protection and aesthetic reasons, while the opposition raised arguments about the reduced concern of COVID-19 and downsides of masks. Conclusion Adolescent mask-wearing is significantly impacted by pre-existing attitudes towards masks, while perceived barriers strongly discourage students from wearing masks. Future research should investigate how to best promote positive beliefs regarding mask-wearing to youth.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".