140 MOTIVATION AND BEHAVIOUR
3 Evaluate the contribution of stage models to the understanding of change in
health behaviours.
4 Critically evaluate the contribution of social cognition models to understanding
the determinants of health behaviours.
5 Describe the intention–behaviour gap in relation to health behaviours.PREDICTING HEALTH BEHAVIOURS
Can we predict who will perform health behaviours? Such knowledge might help us
understand variations in the distribution of health across society and suggest targets for
interventions designed to improve health through changing health behaviours. As you
might expect, a range of differences exist between those who do and do not engage in
health behaviours such as smoking or exercise. These include demographic factors, social
factors, personality factors and cognitive factors (Conner and Norman, 2005, 2015).
What are health behaviours?The range of behaviours influencing health is extremely varied, from health-
enhancing behaviours such as exercise participation and healthy eating, to health-
protective behaviours such as health screening clinic attendance, vaccination
against disease and condom use in response to the threat of AIDS, through to
avoidance of health-harming behaviours such as smoking and excessive alcohol
consumption and sick role behaviours such as compliance with medical regimens.
A unifying theme across these behaviours has been that they each have immediate
or longer-term effects upon the individual’s health and are at least partially within
the individual’s control.
A number of definitions of health behaviours have been suggested. For
example, Kasl and Cobb (1966: 246) defined them as ‘Any activity undertaken by a
person believing himself to be healthy for the purpose of preventing disease or
detecting it at an asymptomatic stage’. Can you see any problems with this
definition? A more recent definition is offered by Conner and Norman (2005: 2),
who define health behaviours as ‘any activity undertaken for the purpose of
preventing or detecting disease or for improving health and well-being’. Behaviours
encompassed in such a definition include medical service usage (e.g. physician
visits, vaccination, screening), compliance with medical regimens (e.g. dietary,
diabetic, antihypertensive regimens) and self-directed health behaviours (e.g. diet,
exercise, breast or testicular self-examination, brushing and flossing teeth,
smoking, alcohol consumption and contraceptive use).FOCUS 7.1