The Health Belief Model To Health Promotion And Communication

In my opinion Social Cognitive Theory is ideal to health promotion and communication. Because the theory deals with cognitive, emotional aspects, behavioral understanding and also explains how people acquire and perform behavioral patterns. On the other hand the concepts of SCT provide not only ways for behavioral research in health education and promotion but also frame work for designing, implementing and evaluating health education and promotion programmes.

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The Health Belief Model

The Health Belief Model (HBM) is one of the first and broadly used theory of health behavior. (Abraham and Sheeran, 2005).It comprises six components that determine behaviour i.e. perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers health motivation and cues to action (Christopher J. Armitage & Mark Conner 2000). It was developed to understand peoples’ beliefs about whether they are at risk for a certain disease or health problem (to produce perceived threat), and their perceptions to seek prevention mechanisms or early detection and treatment (Christopher J. Armitage & Mark Conner 2000) (50,20,36,93).The HBM states that health behavior is constructed by two cognitions: perceptions of illness threat and evaluation of behaviors to with stand the threat. Threat perceptions are based on perceived susceptibility of the individual to the illness and the perceived severity of the consequences of the illness for the individual. Similarly,