Health Behavior

November 15th, 2004

Kelly Doell
 Your behavior?

Consider your last week or two… list some of

the health behavior in which you engaged.
 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)
 Key Definitions
• Health behavior broken down

A) Preventative
B) Protective
C) Illness
D) Sick-role
E) Societal

(Collated by Gochman, 1997)

 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
 Medical Prevention Examples Non-medical Prevention Examples
Immunization against: Eating healthy
- diphtheria - eating breakfast
-eating regularly etc.
- tetanus
- typhoid fever
Weight management
- etc.
Physical activity
Consumption of alcohol
Consuming foods that contain Not smoking
A, C, and D vitamins to Wearing seat belts
prevent pellagra, scurvy,
Obeying traffic laws
and rickets
Safe sex activities
Safety regulations at work
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)
 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
 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.
 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
 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
 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
 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.

 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)
 Bordieu found class differences in lifestyle mostly
surrounding sport and food preferences.

Bordieu’s 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.
 Discussion Questions
• Who influences social structure the most?

• How does this influence routines and health

behavior?
 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