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Keywords: COVID-19, adherence, sanitary measures, misinformation, health literacy, latent trajectories
This study explores how understanding of information and sources’ reliability can influence adherence to health measures implemented by Canadian federal and provincial governments. Previous articles have highlighted the importance of promoting health literacy and minimizing misinformation to encourage higher adherence to key sanitary measures helping to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The data for this study was collected from a representative sample of 3617 Canadians, following a longitudinal design of 11 waves from April 2020 to April 2021. We examined adherence to sanitary measures in the long term by modelling latent trajectories of adherence to key sanitary measures (staying home, social distancing and mask wearing). We obtained models containing four trajectories of adherence for staying home and social distancing measures, and five trajectories for mask wearing. On average, trajectories of higher adherence were linear and regrouped over 80% of the population, while lower adherence trajectories showed more variation through time depending on the circumstances and regrouped only a small portion of the population. We then considered how the level of understanding of information and the level of reliability of sources most used can predict membership in adherence trajectories. Confounding variables such as age, gender, education, revenue, regions, immigration status and political identity were also considered. Overall, a low level of understanding does predict membership in lower adherence trajectories to sanitary measures. Information sources’ reliability also had a significant effect, albeit less important, on adherence trajectories to some measures (staying home and social distancing), as individuals who trust mostly unreliable sources tend to follow lower adherence trajectories. These results highlight that it is essential to ensure good understanding of sanitary measures to promote adherence, regardless of the sources of information used by individuals.