Changing Health Behaviour PDF
Changing Health Behaviour PDF
Changing Health Behaviour PDF
Edited by
Derek Rutter and Lyn Quine
CONTENTS
List of contributors
Acknowledgement
List of abbreviations
1 Social cognition models and changing health behaviours
Derek Rutter and Lyn Quine
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ix
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1
28
49
66
87
105
vi
Contents
123
138
153
172
193
Index
209
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
viii
List of contributors
behaviour that tradition had accepted must exist, and they turned to new
concepts and models for solutions, among them the young Theory of
Reasoned Action (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975). Social cognition quickly
became a distinctive and accepted term, and research developed apace to
make the area one of the fastest growing in the discipline. By the mid1990s, the role of social cognition models in helping to understand and
predict health behaviours was well established in the literature, and the
principal models and health-related research that each had inspired were
brought together for the rst time in Predicting Health Behaviour, edited
by Mark Conner and Paul Norman, which was published by Open University Press in 1996.
The purpose of Conner and Norman (1996) was to provide an integrated
and critical review of the main social cognition models and the research in
health behaviour that had been published within each of the frameworks.
The chapters were contributed by specialists and covered ve widely used
approaches: the Health Belief Model, Health Locus of Control, Protection
Motivation Theory, the Theory of Planned Behaviour and Self-Efcacy. Each
chapter ended with speculations about future directions. Since then, a number
of developments have taken place in the literature, and they are discussed in
this chapter and elsewhere in the book. First, there have been new critical
reviews, some organized by model and some by behaviour. Second, there
have been meta-analyses, which allow results from all the available studies
that reach the authors methodological criteria to be combined statistically.
Third, several writers have explored ways of modifying the existing models,
or adding variables to them, in an effort to strengthen and clarify the prediction and understanding of health behaviours. And, fourth, the rst interventions designed to modify health behaviours through the application of
social cognition models have been designed and preliminary ndings have
begun to appear.
It is the purpose of this book to report some of the most important
interventions that have been recently completed or are in progress. We have
chosen to organize the material by behaviour, but each empirical chapter is
intended to stand alone. Like Conner and Norman, we have asked contributors to follow a common format. Each chapter begins with a statement
of the epidemiological facts about the health problem it addresses, and
describes the links between the behaviour in question and outcome. It then
outlines the theoretical stance the chapter takes, generally by describing
the particular form of the model it employs. The authors then report their
intervention or interventions, and the chapter ends with a discussion of the
implications of the ndings for theory, policy and practice. The one exception to the common format is the concluding chapter, by Stephen Sutton
a nal reection on the problems that authors face and the assumptions
they make in using social cognition models to develop health behaviour
interventions.
their unrealistic optimism and helping them to see the risks as they really
are. The work is based on asking participants to imagine scenarios in which
they develop the disease and have to think about the consequences for their
lives personal, social and work alike. The results so far have differed
markedly according to how optimistically biased respondents were before
the intervention started. The dependent measure was how much peoples
beliefs changed, and the ndings showed an unexpected pattern: those who
were optimistically biased at the outset became less optimistic, but those
who were not became more optimistic. The implication is that interventions must be carefully tailored to peoples initial positions.
Chapter 4 is by Neil D. Weinstein and Peter M. Sandman, and takes
the argument about individual tailoring one step further. It reports a eld
experiment designed to encourage people to test their homes for radon gas.
The basis of the intervention is Weinsteins own Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM), and the chapter is an instructive example of the cyclical way in which theory leads to experimental intervention, which leads
back in turn to modications to theory. Radon is a radioactive gas produced by the decaying uranium found naturally in the soil. In the USA, it is
the leading cause of lung cancer after smoking. The PAPM, a stage theory,
has been used to analyse a variety of health behaviours, and argues that
people will be persuaded to change only if the message is matched to the
stage they have reached in their thinking: unaware of the issue, unengaged,
deciding about acting, decided not to act, decided to act, acting, and maintenance. The chapter focuses on two transitions: unengaged to deciding,
and deciding to acting (in this case ordering a radon testing kit). The intervention was based on videos, and strong support for the model and the
approach to interventions was found: there was good evidence for distinct
stages; and stage-matched attacks, though expensive to produce, succeeded
where others did not.
Chapter 5 is by Christopher J. Armitage and Mark Conner. It is the
rst of the chapters on health-enhancing behaviours, and it reports an
intervention to encourage people to reduce their intake of fat. Excessive fat
is known to be associated with many disorders, including heart disease
and cancer, and guidelines have been produced in several countries. In the
UK, for example, the recommendation is that no more than 35 per cent of
food energy should come from fat, and no more than 11 per cent from
saturated fat, but the average has remained above these gures for 20 years
or more and shows little sign of falling. The authors intervention was
based on their newly extended version of Ajzens Theory of Planned
Behaviour (TPB), and used a randomized control design. Fat intake was
measured at Time 1; three months later participants underwent one of
three interventions (TPB, self-efcacy, or plain information), and ve months
later still their fat intake was measured again. All three interventions
used leaets. Both the TPB and self-efcacy conditions had a small effect
Perceived susceptibility
Perceived severity
Demographic
variables
Perceived benets
Perceived barriers
Cues to action
Behaviour
10
state of readiness to act is determined by perceptions of personal susceptibility or vulnerability to a particular health threat, and perceptions of the
severity with which that threat might affect their life. The extent to which a
course of action is believed to be benecial is the result of beliefs about the
benets to be gained by a particular action weighed against the costs of or
barriers to action. Rosenstock (1966: 101) believed that the level of readiness provided the energy or force to act and the perceptions of benets less
barriers provided a preferred path of action. However, the combination of
these could reach considerable levels of intensity without resulting in overt
action unless some instigating event occurred to set the process in motion
or trigger action in an individual psychologically ready to act (Rosenstock
1966:102). Thus, in addition to the variables already described, a factor
that serves as a cue or a trigger to appropriate action is necessary such
as having an accident oneself (in the case of road safety, for example), or
recent media attention to the issue. This Rosenstock named the cue to
action. Some years later, Rosenstock and his colleagues also suggested that
behavioural intention might be a mediating variable between the components of the HBM and behaviour (Becker et al. 1977). Other researchers have
taken up this suggestion (King 1982; Calnan 1984; Norman and Fitter 1989;
Quine et al. 1998).
Despite its intuitive appeal, the HBM has conceptual difculties. Rosenstock did not specify how different beliefs inuence one another, or how
the explanatory variables combine to inuence behaviour. As a result, different studies have used different combinations of variables, and researchers
have treated variables differently in the analysis. Some, for example, have
used additive models in which the combined weight of the variables is
used to predict outcome, while others have combined variables by adding
vulnerability and severity (Wyper 1990; Witte et al. 1993), multiplying them
(Haefner and Kirscht 1970; Hill et al. 1985; Conner and Norman 1994) or
subtracting barriers from benets (Oliver and Berger 1979; Rutledge 1987;
Wyper 1990). A close inspection of Rosenstocks discussion of the model,
however, seems to indicate that the dimensions are to be treated as separate inuences on health behaviour and that an additive combination is consistent with the underlying theoretical principles (see Weinstein 1988 for
a discussion).
A second problem is that Rosenstock offered no operational denitions
of the variables and therefore researchers use different methods (Champion
1984). Perceived vulnerability is used to measure either personal vulnerability to a specic health threat or a general vulnerability to disease relative
to other people. Barriers, which Rosenstock viewed as primarily psychological, are often used to assess structural impediments instead (Hill et al.
1985; Melnyk 1988; Simon et al. 1993). Several revisions to the model
have therefore been suggested (Becker et al. 1972; Becker and Maiman
1975; Becker et al. 1977). Becker (1974) has argued that the value placed
12
Beliefs about
outcomes
Outcome evaluation
Attitude
Normative beliefs
Motivation
to comply
Subjective
norm
Perceived likelihood
of occurrence
Perceived power to
facilitate/inhibit
Perceived
behavioural
control
Intention
Behaviour
14
1991; Sparks 1994; Parker et al. 1995; Conner and McMillan 1999; Evans
and Norman, Chapter 9 in this volume); anticipated regret (Parker et al.
1995 and Parker, Chapter 8 in this volume; Evans and Norman, Chapter
9); anticipated affect (Van der Pligt and de Vries 1998; Bish et al. 2000);
and affective evaluations of behaviour (Manstead and Parker 1995). A
further construct, self-identity (see Evans and Norman, Chapter 9), has
been proposed as an extension to the TPB to improve the prediction of
intention after criticisms concerning the narrow conceptualization of subjective norm and its consistently weak prediction of intention (see Van den
Putte 1993; Godin and Kok 1996; Armitage et al. 1999; Terry et al. 1999).
Self-identity refers to the idea that intentions are linked to identiable societal
roles and that these roles drive intention (Armitage and Conner in press).
A number of studies using a version of the TPB extended to include selfidentity have found support for this suggestion (Sparks and Shepherd 1992;
Sparks and Guthrie 1998; Evans and Norman, Chapter 9). Yet further
research has been concerned with factors that might moderate the relationship between intentions and behaviour. These include self-schemas (Sheeran
and Orbell 2000a), attention control (Orbell and Sheeran 1998) and implementation intentions (Gollwitzer and Brandsttter 1997; Orbell et al.
1997; Sheeran and Orbell 1999; Orbell and Sheeran, Chapter 7 in this
volume).
3.4 Implementation intentions
The concept of implementation intentions comes from the work of Peter
Gollwitzer. Gollwitzer (1990) and Heckhausen (1991) contend that progress
towards a particular goal begins with a deliberative phase in which the
costs and benets of pursuing the goal are evaluated. The deliberative phase
results in the development of goal intentions or decisions whether or not to
perform the behaviour. Forming a goal intention (for example I intend
to perform X) involves committing oneself to reaching a desired outcome.
Fishbein and Ajzens (1975) Theory of Reasoned Action is similar, in that
behavioural intention is seen as the immediate determinant of behaviour.
However, people frequently have difculty in translating their goals into
action. Gollwitzer (1993) also proposed an implemental phase, in which
planning when, where and how to carry out the goal-directed behaviour (I
intend to perform X whenever Y conditions are encountered) increases
the likelihood that the goal will be attained. The name Gollwitzer used for
these plans was implementation intentions.
Gollwitzer and colleagues (Gollwitzer 1993; Gollwitzer and Brandsttter
1997; Gollwitzer and Oettingen 1998; Gollwitzer and Schaal 1998;
Gollwitzer 1999) have gone on to build a considerable body of empirical
evidence that formulating implementation intentions furthers goal attainment. Gollwitzer and Brandsttter (1997), for example, found that students
16
Stage 2
Contemplation
Stage 3
Preparation
Stage 5
Decided to act
Stage 4
Action
Stage 5
Maintenance
Stage 4
Decided not to act
Stage 6
Acting
Stage 7
Maintenance
18
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