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An Introduction to Healthy Behavior

The document discusses health behaviors, defining them as actions taken to enhance or maintain health, and distinguishes between health behaviors and established health habits. It emphasizes the importance of primary prevention in promoting good health habits and outlines various factors influencing health behaviors, including demographics, personal control, social influence, and knowledge. Additionally, it explores strategies for changing health habits, such as educational appeals, fear appeals, and message framing.

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4 views

An Introduction to Healthy Behavior

The document discusses health behaviors, defining them as actions taken to enhance or maintain health, and distinguishes between health behaviors and established health habits. It emphasizes the importance of primary prevention in promoting good health habits and outlines various factors influencing health behaviors, including demographics, personal control, social influence, and knowledge. Additionally, it explores strategies for changing health habits, such as educational appeals, fear appeals, and message framing.

Uploaded by

42216
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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AN INTRODUCTION TO

HEALTH BEHAVIORS
Health Behaviors and Health Habits

• Health behaviors are behaviors undertaken by people to enhance or


maintain their health. A health habit is a health behavior that is firmly
established and often performed automatically, without awareness.
These habits usually develop in childhood and begin to stabilize
around age 11 or 12 (Cohen, Brownell, & Felix, 1990).
• Sleeping 7 to 8 hours a night
• Not smoking
• Eating breakfast each day
• Getting regular exercise∙
• Not eating between meals
• Being no more than 10 percent overweight
Primary Prevention
Instilling good health habits and changing poor ones is the task
of primary prevention. This means taking measures to combat risk
factors for illness before an illness has a chance to develop. There are
two general strategies of primary prevention. The first and most
common strategy is to get people to alter their problematic health
behaviors, such as helping people lose weight through an intervention.
The second, more recent approach is to keep people from developing
poor health habits in the first place. Smoking prevention pro-
Practicing and Changing Health
Behaviors: An Overview
Demographic Factors
• Younger, more affluent, better-educated people with low
levels of stress and high levels of social support
typically practice better health habits than people under
higher levels of stress with fewer resources.
Age
• Health habits are typically good in childhood,
deteriorate in adolescence and young adulthood, but
improve again among older people.
Values
• Values affect the practice of health habits. For example,
exercise for women may be considered desirable in one
culture but undesirable in another.
Personal Control
• People who regard their health as under their personal
control practice better health habits than people who
regard their health as due to chance. The health locus
of control scale measures the degree to which people
perceive their health to be under personal control,
control by the health practitioner, or chance.
Social Influence
• Family, friends, and workplace companions influence
health-related behaviors, some- times in a beneficial
direction, other times in an ad- verse direction. For
example, peer pressure often leads to smoking in
adolescence but may influence people to stop smoking
in adulthood.
Personal Goals and Values
• Health habits are tied to personal goals. If personal
fitness is an important goal, a person is more likely to
exercise.
Perceived Symptoms
• Some health habits are controlled by perceived
symptoms. For example, a smoker who wakes up with a
smoker’s cough and raspy throat may cut back in the
belief that he or she is vulnerable to health problems at
that time.
Access to the Health Care Delivery
System
• Access to the health care delivery system affects health
behaviors. For example, obtaining a regular Pap smear,
getting mammograms, and receiving immunizations for
childhood diseases depend on access to health care.
Other behaviors, such as losing weight and stopping
smoking, may be indirectly encouraged
Knowledge and Intelligence
• The practice of health behaviors is tied to cognitive
factors, such as knowledge and intelligence. More
knowledgeable and smarter people typically take better
care of themselves. People who are identified as
intelligent in childhood have better health- related
biological profiles in adulthood, which may be explained
by their practice of better health behaviors in early life.
CHANGING HEALTH HABITS
Attitude Change and Health
Behavior
• Educational Appeals: Educational appeals make the
assumption that people will change their health habits if they
have good information about their habits. Early and
continuing efforts to change health habits have consequently
focused heavily on education and changing attitudes. More
recently, though, the fact that attitude change may not lead
to behavior change has prompted research on what
additional factors may be involved. Also, the important
automatic aspect of health habits has been incorporated into
interventions, as unconscious and nonconscious influences
on the practice of health habits have become increasingly
apparent. See table 3.3 on page 46
• Fear Appeals: Attitudinal approaches to changing health
habits often make use of fear appeals. This approach
assumes that if people are afraid that a particular habit is
hurting their health, they will change their behavior to
reduce their fear. However, this rela- tionship does not
always hold. Persuasive messages that elicit too much fear
may actually undermine health behavior change. Moreover,
fear alone may not be sufficient to change behavior. Specific
action recommendations, such as where and how one can
obtain a flu shot, may be needed. Moreover, as already
noted, fear can increase defensiveness, which reduces how
effective an appeal will be.
• Message Framing A health message can be phrased
in positive or negative terms. For example, a reminder
card to get a flu immunization can stress the benefits of
being immunized or stress the discomfort of the flu
itself. Which of these methods is more successful?
Messages that emphasize problems seem to work better
for behaviors that have uncertain outcomes, for health
behaviors that need to be practiced only once, such as
vaccinations, and for issues about which people are
fearful. Messages that stress benefits are more
persuasive for behaviors with certain outcome.

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