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The extent to which citizens comply with newly enacted public health measures such as social distancing or lockdowns strongly affects the propagation of the virus and the number of deaths from COVID-19. It is however very difficult to identify non-compliance through survey research because claiming to follow the rules is socially desirable. Using three survey experiments, we examine the efficacy of different 'face-saving' questions that aim to reduce social desirability in the measurement of compliance with public health measures. Our treatments soften the social norm of compliance by way of a short preamble in combination with a guilty-free answer choice making it easier for respondents to admit non-compliance. We find that self-reported non-compliance increases by up to +11 percentage points when making use of a face-saving question. Considering the current context and the importance of measuring non-compliance, we argue that researchers around the world should adopt our most efficient face-saving question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Households in Canada and Australia have exhibited similar trends in the gendered allocation of additional child care responsibilities resulting from policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we employ survey data to analyze the extent to which policy interventions related to COVID-19 have exacerbated gender disparities in child care obligations. We find that existing asymmetrical distributions of child care obligations in Canada and Australia have been amplified during the pandemic, resulting in a disproportionate burden on women. During the pandemic we also find that, in households with children, women tend to report experiencing poorer mental health than men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The revised guidance on masks from public health officials has been one of the most significant COVID-19 policy reversals to date. Statements made at the outset of the pandemic, including those from the World Health Organization (WHO), the United States Surgeon General, and the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada, all actively discouraged asymptomatic members of the general public from wearing masks. However, on April 3, 2020, the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new recommendations that called for nonmedical masks, such as cloth face coverings, to be worn in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (Adams, 2020). Canadian public health officials quickly followed with their own guidance for wearing nonmedical masks or face coverings when out in public; however, they have stressed that doing so is optional for asymptomatic persons and should be seen as a complement to existing precautionary measures such as physical distancing and hand hygiene, particularly in cases where physical distancing may not be feasible (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2020). Emphasis was placed on nonmedical masks serving not to protect the wearer, but rather others who come within close proximity of the wearer. Echoing her public statements on the matter, Canada's chief public health officer Tweeted that "[w]earing a NON-MEDICAL mask in public settings has not been proven to add any protection TO the person wearing it, but it can be an additional way to prevent spread FROM an infected person to others" (Tam, 2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel coronavirus reached the United States and Canada almost at the same time. The first reported American case was January 20, 2020, and in Canada it was January 15, 2020 (Canada, 2020; Holshue et al., 2020). Yet, the response to this crisis has been different in the two countries. In the US, President Donald Trump, prominent Republicans, and conservative media initially dismissed the dangers of COVID-19 (Stecula, 2020). The pandemic became politicized from the early days, and even though Trump and Republicans have walked back many of their initial claims, there continue to be media reports of partisan differences in public opinion shaped by that early response. At the same time, the response in Canada has been mostly characterized by across-the-board partisan consensus among political elites (Merkley et al., 2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Words matter in politics. The rhetoric that political elites employ structures civic discourse. The emergence of social media platforms as a medium of politics has enabled ordinary citizens to express their ideological inclinations by adopting the lexicon of political elites. This avails to researchers a rich new source of data in the study of political ideology. However, existing ideological text-scaling methods fail to produce meaningful inferences when applied to the short, informal style of textual content that is characteristic of social media platforms such as Twitter. This paper introduces the first viable approach to the estimation of individual-level ideological positions derived from social media content. This method allows us to position social media users—be they political elites, parties, or citizens—along a shared ideological dimension. We validate the proposed method by demonstrating correlation with existing measures of ideology across various political contexts and multiple languages. We further demonstrate the ability of ideological estimates to capture derivative signal by predicting out-of-sample, individual-level voting intentions. We posit that social media data can, when properly modeled, better capture derivative signal than discrete scales used in more traditional survey instruments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]