Health Behavior November 15 th, 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 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

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