Abstract

Individuals develop different protective behavioral patterns toward a specific disease based on their knowledge of effective interventions. Understanding how people behave individually toward an outbreak of a disease can help experts to evaluate different control strategies and to implement the most effective one.
In this research we use the Health Belief Model (HBM) to evaluate the health behavior of students toward influenza in Concordia University and its effect on the spread of virus within the target population. We conduct a survey to gather information about the health-related attitudes and beliefs of students. We apply our survey a control and a treatment group to explore the effect of education on people’s health-related behaviors patterns. Control group reflects the behavioral patterns of students based on their general knowledge of influenza and its interventions while the treatment group illustrates the level of behavioral changes after individuals have been educated by a health care expert.
In this research we use an agent-based simulation to explore the effect of individuals behaviors patterns on the spread of influenza and illustrate how the health-related behavior changes in individuals can affect the chances of exposure to the virus.