Abstract
The world is currently dealing with a devastating pandemic. Although growing COVID-19 case numbers, deaths, and hospitalizations are concerning, this spread is particularly alarming in the United States where polarizing opinions, changing policies, and misinformation abound. In particular, American college campuses have been a venue of rampant transmission, with concerning spillover into surrounding, more vulnerable, communities. We surveyed over 600 college students from across the United States and modeled predictors of compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions. We identified concern with severity, constitutionalism, news exposure, and religiosity as significant positive correlates with compliance, and general trust in science as a significant negative correlate. To determine how applicable nationwide modeling might be to individual local campuses we also administered this same survey to nearly 600 students at two large universities in Utah County. In this population, concern with severity was the only significant positive correlate with compliance; Additionally, feelings of inconvenience were negatively correlated. The effects of feelings of inconvenience, and news exposure were significantly different between populations. These results suggest that we should focus our efforts on increasing knowledge about the pandemic’s effects on our society and informing about constitutionality amongst college students. However, we also show that nationwide surveys and modeling are informative, but if campuses are to efficiently curb the spread of COVID-19 this coming semester, they would be best served to utilize data collected from their student populations as these might significantly differ from general consensus data.
Highlights
Background on pandemicThe emergence of the novel coronavirus Sars-Cov-2, which causes the disease COVID-19, rapidly spread from an outbreak to a global pandemic [1]
While our interview sample size was small, we observed the following patterns which are reflected in our instrument:. Those who mentioned that their religiosity influenced their attitude about the pandemic tended to take NPIs more seriously, even when compared to those who had a high religiosity in general
High correlation between items indicated that the General Religiosity and Religiosity and COVID instruments should be combined into one latent variable that we labeled Religiosity
Summary
Ethics statementPermission for this study was obtained from the institutional review board at Brigham Young University. Our filters were as follows: We targeted students currently enrolled in a college or university, including public, private, and trade schools; participant age had to be 18 or above; we recruited approximately 50% male and 50% female, ‘other’ was included in analysis; race/ethnicity was selected based on national averages of approximately 66% non-hispanic white, 12% non-hispanic black, 12% hispanic, and 10% other; and we recruited approximately 50% of the sample on the left-side of the politically ideology spectrum, and 50% on the right side Given these filters and a request for approximately 600 responses from each population [based on the general rule of thumb of between 5 and 10 responses per parameter measured, and an approximate 70-item measurement model [36, 37] and taking into account our demographic parameters), we obtained 608 responses in our national sample. This left us with 547 in the General population and 595 in the Utah County population
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