DISPATCHES Media Effects on Students during SARS Outbreak
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A few months after the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, a sample of Canadian undergraduate university students completed a questionnaire that showed that, despite believing media coverage of the outbreak was excessive, they had little anxiety about acquiring SARS. Additionally, 69 % of participants failed a SARS-specific knowledge section of the questionnaire. The 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) underlined the importance of fast and accurate risk communication to the public. Several studies have attempted to evaluate the media’s performance during the outbreak (1,2), and the general consensus is that the media coverage was excessive, sometimes inaccurate, and sensationalist (1–3). Whether this excessive coverage had a beneficial or detrimental effect on the public remains unknown. A logical assumption would be that, in response, the public would not only have high anxiety of acquiring SARS, but also would be more informed about the cause, symptoms, and other aspects associated with the syndrome. The purpose of this study was to determine, in an undergraduate university student population, preferences and use of various types of mass communication media, anxiety levels of acquiring the infection, and general knowledge of SARS. The Study Following ethics approval by the Brock University Research Ethics Board in October 2003, a pilot survey of 30 students was conducted to validate a questionnaire and determine the sample size for the study. Results showed that approximately 30 % of participants may have had some anxiety of acquiring SARS during the outbreak. Therefore, in a population of 13,000 students, a sample of 310 was calculated to obtain a measurable anxiety level
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".