Do University Students Adhere to WHO Guidelines on Proper Use of Face Masks during the COVID-19 Pandemic?—Analysis and Comparison of Medical and Non-Medical Students

The inhibitors and enablers of emerging adult COVID-19 mitigation compliance in a township context

Young adults are often scapegoated for not complying with COVID-19 mitigation strategies. While studies have investigated what predicts this population’s compliance and non-compliance, they have largely excluded the insights of African young people living in South African townships. Given this, it is unclear what places young adult South African township dwellers at risk for not complying with physical distancing, face masking and handwashing, or what enables resilience to those risks. To remedy this uncertainty, the current article reports a secondary analysis of transcripts (n=119) that document telephonic interviews in June and October 2020 with 24 emerging adults (average age: 20 years) who participated in the Resilient Youth in Stressed Environments (RYSE) study. The secondary analysis, which was inductively thematic, pointed to compliance being threatened by forgetfulness; preventive measures conflicting with personal/collective style; and structural constraints. Resilience to these compliance risks lay in young people’s capacity to regulate their behaviour and in the immediate social ecology’s capacity to co-regulate young people’s health behaviours. These findings discourage health interventions that are focused on the individual. More optimal public health initiatives will be responsive to the risks and resilience-enablers associated with young people and the social, institutional, and physical ecologies to which young people are connected.

Students’ Perceptions of Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication Behaviors during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic

Aiming at shedding light on the implications the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the students’ social and personal lives, this study has focused on the verbal and non-verbal communication and on the surveyees’ personal lives during the pandemic as well as on the perspective of changing their communication behaviors after the pandemic. The 409 respondents, students at Politehnica University of Timisoara, took part in a survey, conducted between 1 April and 30 May 2021, that was posted on isondaje.ro, a Romanian online survey platform. The research has suggested the following results: the adjustment of the verbal communication by speaking in a more articulated manner or more loudly; the overuse of the upper part of the face to compensate for the concealed parts of the face due to face mask wearing; the analysis of the factors underlying the respondents’ actions, i.e., relational attitudes, various greeting forms, various non-verbal reactions, which are aspects that are likely to change even after the pandemic. The results have also presented the changes that interpersonal communication could go through under the pressure of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, but also the ways through which people try to protect their most valuable asset, i.e., communication, which defines humanity and makes us unique as human beings.