A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Health Belief Model Variables in Predicting Behavior

By Christopher J. Carpenter. Health Communication, 2010

1,508 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Health Belief Model (HBM; Rosenstock, 1966) was constructed to explain which beliefs should be targeted in communication campaigns to cause positive health behaviors. The model specifies that if individuals perceive a negative health outcome to be severe, perceive themselves to be susceptible to it, perceive the benefits to behaviors that reduce the likelihood of that outcome to be high, and perceive the barriers to adopting those behaviors to be low, then the behavior is likely for those individuals. A meta-analysis of 18 studies (2,702 subjects) was conducted to determine whether measures of these beliefs could longitudinally predict behavior. Benefits and barriers were consistently the strongest predictors. The length of time between measurement of the HBM beliefs and behavior, prevention versus treatment behaviors, and drug-taking regimens versus other behaviors were identified as moderators of the HBM variables' predictive power. Based on the weakness of two of the predictors, the continued use of the direct effects version of the HBM is not recommended.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ecdd11c7889c666eab757f44eab155bc50cdcad

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Citations in the corpus

The Health Belief Model as an Explanatory Framework in Communication Research: Exploring Parallel, Serial, and Moderated Mediation (2014, methodology): “Previous research has found that perceived susceptibility is a better predictor than severity (Janz & Becker, 1984), although findings are somewhat conflicted on this issue (Carpenter, 2010).”
Identification of the healthy neurotic: Personality traits predict smoking after disease onset (2015, background): “Beliefs that a particular health behavior will be beneficial predicts engagement in that behavior (Carpenter, 2010).”
Which Healthy Eating Nudges Work Best? A Meta-Analysis of Field Experiments (2018, neutral): “Even interventions that successfully change beliefs about the health consequences of behaviors often fail to lead tomeaningful behavioral changes (Carpenter 2010, Sniehotta et al. 2014).”
Meaning in Life and Health: Proactive Health Orientation Links Meaning in Life to Health Variables Among American Undergraduates (2015, methodology): “1992) and a meta-analysis found that only two of the variables—barriers and benefits—consistently predicted health behaviors over time (Carpenter 2010).”
Customers response to online food delivery services during COVID‐19 outbreak using binary logistic regression (2020, background): “Health-related behaviours are also influenced by the perceived benefits and perceived risk of taking action (Carpenter, 2010; Glanz et al., 1992; Janz & Becker, 1984; Tang & Wong, 2004).”
Beyond confidence: Development of a measure assessing the 5C psychological antecedents of vaccination (2018, methodology): “In previous work [22], we therefore suggested constellations of psychological predictors that match the hesitancy factors’ definitions (given in Table 1, column 2), referring to established theoretical frameworks, such as the Health Belief Model [24] and the Theory of Planned Behavior [23].”