Normalization and Civility: Attitudes and Trends Around Mask-Wearing among MacEwan Students in Fall 2024
Bibliographic record
Abstract
COVID-19 remains a prominent threat years after its initial sweep across the globe. Despite this, public health measures have fallen to the wayside; vaccine supplies face delays, rapid test kits are difficult to access, and mask-wearing now lacks the attention it received years prior. In this project, I examined current attitudes and trends around mask-wearing among MacEwan University students. Using grounded theory (Starks & Trinidad, 2007), I conducted one focus group with three MacEwan students, and qualitative observations from three different locations at MacEwan University. Mask-wearing on campus has become less common overall, and the mask’s once-salient status as an emotionally and politically charged symbol has lessened compared to previous pandemic years. Further, mask-wearing is not seen as a necessity to maintain public health or an intrusion on one’s autonomy, but as an individual choice for individual protection, adopted only in particular circumstances. As COVID-19 and other health crises continue to threaten our health and well-being, examining current attitudes around mask-wearing and mask mandates can provide direction for further action to mitigate COVID-19 and prevent future pandemics.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".