Adolescents’ impairment due to climate anxiety is associated with self-efficacy and behavioral engagement: a cross-sectional analysis in Quebec (Canada)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The current understanding of climate anxiety among adolescents is sparse. This study identifies the characteristics of adolescents living in Quebec (Canada) who experience impairments induced by climate anxiety, who have feelings of self-efficacy and who adopt pro-environment behaviors. It also characterizes the association between climate anxiety, feelings of self-efficacy, and environmental actions. METHODS: We used a cross-sectional design to analyze data from the COMPASS study on adolescent health. Participants (n = 45 362) from 113 schools in Quebec (Canada) answered questions about climate anxiety, self-efficacy, behavioral engagement, and several indicators of well-being. Data were analyzed using ordered logistic regressions adjusted for potential confounders (age, gender, school type, material deprivation, etc.). RESULTS: 9% of adolescents reported that thinking about climate change made it difficult to sleep at least sometimes. 6% of adolescents reported that thinking about climate change interfered with their ability to get work or assignments done at least sometimes. Only 34% believed they could do something to address the problem, and 43% tried to reduce their behaviors that contribute to climate change at least sometimes. Adolescents who were boys or who were less anxious experienced less impairment and were less involved in the fight against climate change. Adolescents from less affluent families experienced more difficulty sleeping and interference with work but were not more engaged. Those with stronger school connectedness experienced less impairment and were more often involved in the fight against climate change. Adolescents who felt they could do something about climate change were more likely to try to reduce behaviors that contribute to climate change. CONCLUSION: The findings are useful to identify and support vulnerable groups that are more likely to experience impairment due to climate anxiety. The feeling of climate self-efficacy was not well developed among some groups of adolescents. Improving adolescents' beliefs in their capacity to help address climate change may be a key strategy to promote pro-environmental actions. As the threat of climate change increases, it will be important to follow the evolution of climate anxiety and engagement among adolescents.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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 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".