Workplace violence in the COVID-19 era: a qualitative analysis of harassment and threats against public health professionals in Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives: This study reports the results of a qualitative study involving public health professionals and documents their experiences with cyberviolence, harassment and threats during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method and analysis: The research adopted a discovery-oriented qualitative design, using constructivist grounded theory method and long interview style data collection. Twelve public health professionals from across Canada who held responsibility for COVID-19 response and public health measures in their respective jurisdictions participated. Constant comparative analysis was used to generate concepts through inductive processes. Results: Data revealed a pattern that began with mainstream media engagement, moved to indirect cyberviolence on social media that fuelled outrage and polarisation of members of the public, followed by direct cyberviolence in the form of email abuse and threats, and finally resulted in physical threats and confrontation-which were then glorified and amplified on social media. The prolonged nature and intensity of harassment and threats led to negative somatic, emotional, professional and social outcomes. Concerns were raised that misinformation and comments undermining the credibility of public health professionals weakened public trust and ultimately the health of the population. Participants provided recommendations for preventing and mitigating the effects of cyber-instigated violence against public health professionals that clustered in three areas: better supports for public health personnel; improved systems for managing communications; and legislative controls on social media including reducing the anonymity of contributors. Conclusion: The prolonged and intense harassment, abuse and threats against public health professionals during COVID-19 had significant effects on these professionals, their families, staff and ultimately the safety and health of the public. Addressing this issue is a significant concern that requires the attention of organisations responsible for public health and policy makers.
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.
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 | 0.032 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it