Compliance with Social Distancing Measures During the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Highly Educated Sample: A Descriptive Structural Equation Modeling Study

Objective: Graduate students, who are both young and highly educated, are expected to show unique characteristics regarding compliance with social distancing measures. This study aimed to investigate the level and predictors of compliance to these measures of graduate students. Material and Methods: This research was conducted between August and November 2021 with 361 graduate students from four institutes of Hacettepe University. A total of 9300 students attended these institutes. The study is descriptive in nature, no concerns about representativeness were taken into account, no sample size calculation was performed before the study, and it was aimed to reach all students. Mann Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used for comparing continuous variables. The level of compliance with social distancing measures and its predictors were evaluated using structural equation modeling based on the Protection Motivation Theory. The