Face mask mandates alter major determinants of adherence to protective health behaviours in Australia
Matthew Ryan, Jinjing Ye, Justin Sexton, Roslyn I. Hickson, Emily Brindal

TL;DR
This study shows how face mask mandates in Australia changed the factors influencing mask wearing and other protective health behaviors during the pandemic.
Contribution
The study reveals how mandates altered key predictors of mask adherence, offering insights for future public health strategies.
Findings
Ensemble and tree-based models best predicted mask wearing before and after mandates.
Age, survey week, contacts, wellbeing, and illness threat perception were consistent predictors.
Trust in government and willingness to isolate emerged as unique predictors before and after mandates, respectively.
Abstract
Face mask wearing is a protective health behaviour that helps mitigate the spread of infectious diseases such as influenza and COVID-19. Understanding predictors of face mask wearing can help refine public health messaging and policy in future pandemics. Government mandates influence face mask wearing, but how mandates change predictors of face mask wearing has not been explored. We investigate how mandates changed predictors of face mask wearing and general protective behaviours within Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic using cross-sectional survey data. We compared four machine learning models to predict face mask wearing and general protective behaviours before and after mandates started in Australia; ensemble, tree-based models (XGBoost and random forests) performed best. Other than state, common predictors before and after mandates included age, survey week, average number of…
Genes, proteins, chemicals, diseases, species, mutations and cell lines named across the full text — each resolved to its canonical identifier and authoritative record.
Click any figure to enlarge with its caption.
Figure 1
Figure 2Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsCOVID-19 epidemiological studies · COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy
