Healthy living Psychology-The Health Belief Model (concept)

The health belief model is a Cognitive explanation for behaviour and is one of the first models into health behaviour, it was developed during the 1950s by a group of U.S Public Health Service social psychologists who wanted to find out why people were not participating in disease prevention groups etc then it was later developed by a guy named Becker (remember his name). The Health Belief Model (HBM) is a good model for addressing problems that evoke health concerns for example high-risk sexual behaviour and the possibility of contracting HIV.



(copyright from http://www.o-wm.com/article/continence-coach-revitalizing-health-belief-model-support-shared-decision-making)

The health belief model proposes that a person's health related behaviour depends on the person's perception of four critical areas

• The severity of a potential illness- how bad will the hangover be after a night out (how harmful the behaviour will be, low harm=lower cost)
• The susceptibility to that illness-will they get a hangover when they wake up (How likely the person is to get it, less likely=lower cost)                                                                                                         (the two above come under the perceived threat box in the diagram above-Both influencing factors)                              
• The perceived benefits of taking a preventive action, for example, drinking a pint of water after a night out, the benefit would be no hangover
• The perceived barriers (cost)to taking that action for example having to get out of bed to get the water or feeling more sick after drinking it.                                                                                                                                                                                      

Now if the Barriers outweigh the benefit of doing the certain action the health behaviour will not be performed

Enabling and modifying factors of the health behaviour (more technical)

perceived susceptibility:   Refers to a person's perception that a health problem is personally relevant or that a diagnosis of illness is accurate.
Perceived severity: Even when someone recognises personal susceptibility, action will not occur unless the individual perceives the severity to be high enough to have serious problems caused physically and mentally
Perceived benefits: Refers to the patient's belief that a given treatment will cure the illness or help to prevent it
Perceived costs: Refers to the complexity, duration, and accessibility of the treatment
Motivation: The desire to comply with a treatment and the belief that people should do what.
Modifying factors: including personality variables, patient satisfaction and socio-demographic factors

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages

•  The main benefit of the Health belief model is that it promotes the uptake of services offered by social psychologists.

Study information (not fully needed)

The outbreak of Swine influenza in 1976 presented an opportunity for researchers to test the Health Belief Model (HBM).  The health beliefs and inoculation status of 122 senior citizens (primarily black and Portuguese-American) who were active in two senior centers was surveyed, and their results were documented.  They were given a 45-item interview designed to draw out the respondents' beliefs along all of the major Health Belief Model dimensions.  As a result, the investigators found positive correlations between the HBM items and the subjects' inoculation status along all of the dimensions of the HBM except for "severity".  The authors concluded that the model was useful in regards to understanding the variables which influence a person's readiness to undertake recommended preventive medical care

This therefore gives it high practical applications (being used in real life situations) because it was able to locate the variables affecting the person to take the medical care needed.

(Copyright from http://healthbeliefmodel.weebly.com/evidence.html).

• It offers a individual explanation of behaviour (individual-situational debate), this offers a explanation of the persons individual thoughts on performing the behaviour for example someone smoking will be based on the persons thoughts about getting lung cancer or some illness from it and weighs up whether the action is worth it instead of explaining they might smoke because everyone else is smoking around them

Disadvantage

Limited ability for predicting behaviour e.g. sexual practices in university students.

study information (not needed in much detail for exam)

In 1992, a survey was conducted on 122 US college students aged 17-35 to predict condom usage and risky sexual practices.  However, the HBM didn't significantly explain condom usage, but instead partially explained the variance in sexual risk behaviours.  The HBM focuses more on motivating people to take action instead of predicting future behaviours.  Researchers noted, "Unless the HBM is expanded to include other behaviour-specific cognitive factors (like barriers and benefits associated with multiple sexual partnerships), its ability to explain more than a small proportion of the variance in behaviours that prevent AIDS will remain limited".

this lowers the usefulness of the Health belief model.

(copyright from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9451482)

• Its ignores other factors that influence health behaviour

The HBM is not a good fit for school smoking education programs that cover a variety of information related to smoking but are not specifically action-oriented.

Applying the HBM to smoking education is possible but is not necessarily a good fit. Youth smoke for many reasons — personal reasons, religious reasons, logistical reasons — not always mainly to avoid a perceived threat of a negative health outcome. Using HBM's threat-logic model to promote not smoking could be less effective then using other methods.