Health Behavior

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Health Behavior

• November 15th, 2004
• Kelly Doell

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Your behavior?

• Consider your last week or two list some of the
  health behavior in which you engaged.

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• Working Definition
• Personal attributes such as beliefs,
  expectations, motives, values, perceptions, and
  other cognitive elements personality
  characteristics, including affective emotional
  states and traits and overt behavior patterns,
  actions and habits that relate to health
  maintenance, to health restoration and to health
  improvement (Gochman, 1988, p. 3)

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Key Definitions

• Health behavior broken down
• A) Preventative
• B) Protective
• C) Illness
• D) Sick-role
• E) Societal
• (Collated by Gochman, 1997)

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Key Definitions

• A. Preventative
• Any medically recommended action, voluntarily
  taken by the person who believes themselves to be
  healthy, that tends to prevent disease or
  disability and/ or detect disease in an
  asymptomatic way
• i. Primary reduction or elimination of risk
  factors
• ii. Secondary asymptomatic detection of a
  disease in its early stages

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• Medical Prevention Examples
• Immunization against
• - diphtheria
• - tetanus
• - typhoid fever
• - etc.
• Consuming foods that contain A, C, and D vitamins
  to prevent pellagra, scurvy, and rickets

• Non-medical Prevention Examples
• Eating healthy
• - eating breakfast
• -eating regularly etc.
• Weight management
• Physical activity
• Consumption of alcohol
• Not smoking
• Wearing seat belts
• Obeying traffic laws
• Safe sex activities
• Safety regulations at work

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• Secondary Prevention (Physician-generated
  prevention)
• Facilitate the early detection of a condition
  (and thus minimize its impact
• E.g. physical exams to detect signs of cancer,
  heart disease, or dental conditions
• Passive vs. Active
• Societal public health activities vs. individual
  activities
• E.g. Chlorination (societal and passive) vs.
  dental flossing (individual and active)

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Key Definitions

• B) Protective
• Actions that people engage in to protect,
  promote, or maintain health, whether these
  actions are medically approved or not

• E.g. praying, taking laxatives, cold showers, hot
  baths, taking mega-doses of vitamins, wearing
  copper bracelets, eating garlic, hitting yourself
  on the head with a baseball bat

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Key Definitions

• C) Illness behaviour
• Actions by persons who are uncertain about
  whether they are well, who are troubled or
  puzzled by bodily sensations or feelings they
  believe are signs or symptoms of illness, who
  want to clarify the meaning of these experiences
  and thus determine whether they are well, and who
  want to know what to do if they are not
• help seeking behavior, responses to bodily signs

• E.g. seeking opinion from someone who is
  perceived to having expertise, seeing a
  naturopath, taking blood pressure at drug store,
  seeing a physician etc.

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Key Definitions

• D) Sick-role
• Actions undertaken by people who have been
  designated as being sick, either by others or by
  themselves

E.g. returning for medical appointments, bed
rest, going to physiotherapy/rehab also can
include prayer and visiting shrines
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Key Definitions

• E) Societal health behavior
• What society does for the collectivity

• E.g. health education, food safety, licensing of
  professional providers, monitor the environment

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Risk Behavior

• If your friends jumped off a bridge, would
  you jump off, too?
• Moms everywhere
• Only if I went last My risk assessed
  response
• Risk behavior
• Behavior that jeopardizes current or future
  health
• Examples
• Smoking, not wearing a seat belt, heavy drinking,
  driving fast, unprotected promiscuous sex

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A few notes on lifestyle

• Health lifestyles are collective patterns of
  health-related behavior based on choices from
  options available to people according to their
  life chances.
• Bourdieu (1984) believed that although
  individuals choose their lifestyles, they do not
  do so with complete free will.
• A part of lifestyle is formed by the habitus.

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Notion of a Habitus

• Social structures and conditions engender
  enduring personal orientations that are more or
  less routine, and when these orientations are
  acted upon, they tend to reproduce the structures
  from which they are derived.
• (Gochman, 1997, p. 258)

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• Bordieu found class differences in lifestyle
  mostly surrounding sport and food preferences.
• Bordieus lesson routines of individuals are
  influenced by structures of their social world
  and that the practice of these routines
  perpetuates the structures
• Class culture
  Food habits
• Bottom Line?
• Strong influence of structure (i.e. life
  chances) on the habitus mind-set from which
  lifestyle choices are derived (Gochman, 1997).
  Lifestyles are systematic products of habitus and
  become socially qualified.

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Discussion Questions

• Who influences social structure the most?
• How does this influence routines and health
  behavior?

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References

• Bourdieu, P. (1990) The logic of practice.
  Stanford, CA Stanford University Press.
• Gochman, D. S. (1988). Health behavior Plural
  perspectives. In D. S. Gochman (Ed.), Health
  behavior Emerging perspectives. (pp. 3 17).
  New York Plenum Press
• Gochman, D. S. (1997). Handbook of health
  behavior research. New York Plenum Press