An Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills (IMB) Model of Pandemic Risk and Prevention

Abstract

COVID-19 will be with us well into the future, and four years into the pandemic, it continues to cause serious individual and public health consequences and economic impact worldwide. Mindful of the staggering continuing costs of the COVID-19 pandemic, calls are urgently being made to “prepare now for the next pandemic.” Containing future pandemics will require at the very core widespread, voluntary, and sustained behavior change to prevent spread of pandemic disease. Such efforts must be based upon well-validated behavioral science models of health behavior change articulated to foreseeable future pandemic contexts. Past public health attempts to change behaviors that can spread pandemic-related pathogens have generally been reactive and have very rarely exploited well-tested behavioral science models of health behavior change. We present an Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills (IMB) Model of Pandemic Risk and Prevention as a conceptual foundation for understanding the determinants and dynamics of pandemic risk and preventive behavior and as a systematic framework for the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions to promote and maintain pandemic preventive behavior. Our model is highly generalizable across pandemic scenarios. It is currently testable in the context of COVID-19 (e.g., in interventions to increase the very low rates of bivalent booster vaccine uptake in adults, and vaccination uptake in children), and can be tested in future localized epidemics, and in pandemic simulation studies. The IMB model of Health Behavior Change, upon which our new model is based, is an empirically well validated and supported multivariate model utilized successfully for decades to understand and promote behavior change in multiple health domains. Our introduction of the IMB Model of Pandemic Risk and Prevention aims to contribute to theoretically- and empirically-based efforts to reduce risk and promote prevention in future pandemics and in the continuing COVID-19 pandemic.