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Record W4414871646 · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0307423

Foundations under pressure: Qualitative interviews on the impact of prolonged pandemic and public health measures on Ontario youth and young adults

2025· article· en· W4414871646 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Laurel Austin, Sebastian Chavez, Celina Degano

Bibliographic record

VenuePLoS ONE · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicCOVID-19 and Mental Health
Canadian institutionsPublic Health OntarioWestern University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsPandemicYoung adultPublic healthQualitative researchWork (physics)Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)2019-20 coronavirus outbreak

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

INTRODUCTION: Foundations of youth and young adults' (YYAs) lives were shaken by the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic. This study explores how over a year of pandemic, with several periods of stay-at-home orders, impacted Ontario YYAs and important foundations that influence their development and future wellbeing. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews were conducted April - June 2021 during stay-at-home orders. Nineteen Ontario YYAs, age 16-21, were asked how relationships, education, work, and important events had been impacted by the pandemic and public health responses, and how they had coped. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to iteratively engage with data to distill themes. Respondents included: eight high school students, ten post-secondary students, one full time employed. RESULTS: Three main themes were identified. First, disruptions to individual agency and life course (theme), included (subthemes): drastic shift to increased time and isolation at home; feeling responsible for others' health and safety; learning and professional development suffered; precarious employment; and lost beginnings and endings to important transitions. Second, relationships and connectedness changed (theme), included (subthemes): Friendships were altered; family dynamics changed; and international students faced unique challenges. Third, wellbeing and coping (theme), included (sub-themes): stress was high; coping methods were diverse; and connecting digitally was suboptimal. Some friendships were lost; some grew closer. Those in their last year of high school/university in spring 2020 or 2021 lost important transitional endings (graduation, etc.). Those starting post-secondary in fall 2020 also lost transitional beginnings (e.g., leaving home, on-campus experience, meeting new friends). CONCLUSIONS: There is need for further research to assess long-term impacts, especially among YYAs who had family members at severe risk and those who graduated high school during the pandemic. Public health practitioners should work with high schools and post-secondary schools to develop approaches to limit the severity of altered schooling and important transitions in future upheavals.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.006
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.470
Threshold uncertainty score0.946

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0060.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0120.008
Scholarly communication0.0030.001
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.389
GPT teacher head0.467
Teacher spread0.077 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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