COVID-19 Guidelines: A Multimodal Video Analysis of Student Behavioral Compliance during Senior Secondary Certificate Examination

Abstract

In order to address the economic pressure and the negative impact of school closure on students, Nigerian government approved the reopening of secondary schools for graduating classes starting from 4th August, 2020, with comprehensive guidelines and protocols. Regrettably, many students were reported to have tested positive to COVID-19, questioning their compliance towards the guidelines. This study therefore investigates students’ behavioral compliance towards COVID-19 guidelines, and factors predicting such behavior. Participants involved 205 graduating secondary school students whose behavioral compliance towards the guidelines was observed over three examination days. Although coding large amount of video data and identifying social actions from the data had become a huge challenge for many researchers, our study show that observable behavior can be catalogued using multimodal approach to identify and characterize behavioral frames in rich video data. Three state Hidden Markov Models was estimated in R package on three observed and categorized behavior: hand-washing, use of face mask, and social distancing. Based on probabilities of occurrence of these behaviors, three behavioral frames emerged: cautious, reluctant and defiant attitudes. Results show that defiant attitude was the most prevalent among the behavioral frames, with some level of alternation between reluctant and cautious frame. Our follow-up OLS model indicates that perceived health threat, perceived clarity of guidelines, obligation to obey rule, moral alignment, emotional state, and impulsivity significantly predict students’ behavioral compliance towards COVID-19 guidelines. We recommend stringent measures and intensive awareness campaign to mitigate students’ offending behavior.