Health Belief Model

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Health Belief was a psychological model developed by Rosenstock in the 1966 for studying and promoting the uptake of services offered by social psychologists. The model was furthered by Becker and colleagues in the 1970s and 1980s. Subsequent amendments to the model were made as late as 1988, to accommodate evolving evidence generated within the health community about the role that knowledge and perceptions play in personal responsibility.^[1] Originally, the model was designed to predict behavioral response to the treatment received by acutely or chronically ill patients, but in more recent years the model has been used to predict more general health behaviors. ^[2]

[edit] Constructs

The original Health Belief Model, constructed by Rosenstock (1966), was based on four constructs of the core beliefs of individuals based on their perceptions:

• Perceived susceptibility (an individual's assessment of their risk of getting the condition)
• Perceived severity (an individual's assessment of the seriousness of the condition, and its potential consequences)
• Perceived barriers (an individual's assessment of the influences that facilitate or discourage adoption of the promoted behavior)
• Perceived benefits (an individual's assessment of the positive consequences of adopting the behavior).

• A variant of the model include the perceived costs of adhering to prescribed intervention as one of the core beliefs.

Constructs of mediating factors were later added to connect the various types of perceptions with the predicted health behavior:

• Demographic variables (such as age, gender, ethnicity, occupation)
• Socio-psychological variables (such as social economic status, personality, coping strategies)
• Perceived efficacy (an individual's self-assessment of ability to successfully adopt the desired behavior)
• Cues to action (external influences promoting the desired behavior, may include information provided or sought, reminders by powerful others, persuasive communications, and personal experiences)
• Health motivation (whether an individual is driven to stick to a given health goal)
• Perceived control (a measure of level of self-efficacy)
• Perceived threat (whether the danger imposed by not undertaking a certain health action recommended is great)

The prediction of the model is the likelihood of the individual concerned to undertake recommended health action (such as preventive and curative health actions).

[edit] References