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. 2019 Dec 27;17(1):197.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph17010197.

Willingness to Self-Isolate When Facing a Pandemic Risk: Model, Empirical Test, and Policy Recommendations

Xiaojun Zhang  1   2 , Fanfan Wang  3 , Changwen Zhu  3 , Zhiqiang Wang  3
Affiliations

Willingness to Self-Isolate When Facing a Pandemic Risk: Model, Empirical Test, and Policy Recommendations

Xiaojun Zhang et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Infected people are isolated to minimize the spread of pandemic diseases. Therefore, the factors related to self-isolation (SI) should not be neglected, and it is important to investigate the factors leading the infected (or possibly infected) people to choose to self-isolate. In this paper, we tried to show that the theory of planned behavior provides a useful conceptual framework for SI when facing a pandemic risk, and a regression method with Chinese provincial (Guangdong Province) data was applied to investigate how attitude (ATT), subjective norms (SN), and perceived behavioral control (PBC) influence SI when facing a pandemic emergency. The results and the robustness tests confirm that ATT, SN, and PBC have a significant positive influence on SI when facing a pandemic emergency. ATT plays the most important role, followed by SN and then PBC. Based on the factors of SI, we found, through theoretical and empirical analyses, at least three important aspects that local governments need to consider to encourage citizens to self-isolate when facing a pandemic.

Keywords: pandemic risk; planned behavior; self-isolation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Conceptual Model. ATT, attitudes toward the behavior; SN, subjective norms with respect to the behavior; PBC, perceived control over the behavior.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Willingness for SI.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The mean score of SI reported in Guangdong, 2018.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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