Do Operational Facilitating Conditions and Subjective Norms Improve the Intention to use Social Distancing Nudge during a Pandemic: A Case of SARS-CoV-2(COVID-19) Outbreak in India

The COVID-19 outbreak reached a critical stage where it became imperative for public health systems to act decisively and design potential behavioral operational strategies that aim at containment of the pandemic. Isolation through social distancing plays a key role in achieving this objective. This research study is conducted to examine the factors affecting the intention of individuals towards social distancing in India. Correlation survey study is conducted on the samples of Pan Indian ( N  = 499) residents. Online questionnaire was floated consisting of Health Belief Model, and Theory of Planned Behavior Model, with respect to social distancing behavior at an initial occasion. Finally, Structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses. The results show that Perceived susceptibility, Facilitating Conditions and Subjective Norms are the major predictors of Attitude towards social distancing with the effect size of 0.277, 0.132, and 0.551 respectively. The result also confirms that the Attitude towards social distancing, perceived Usefulness of social distancing, and Subjective Norms significantly predicted the Intention to use the social distancing with the effect size of 0.355, 0.197, and 0.385 respectively. The non-significant association of Perceived Susceptibility(PS) with Social Distancing Intention (IN) (H1b) is rendering the fact that Attitude (AT) mediates the relationship between PS and IN similarly, the non-significant association of Facilitating Conditions (FC) with IN (H5) is rendering the fact that AT mediates the relationship between FC and IN. Results of the study is helpful to the policy makers to handle operations management of nudges like social distancing. The research is one of its kind that explores the behavioral aspects of handling social nudges.