How Your Behaviour Can Affect Your Health!

HEALTH BELIEF MODEL AS IT APPLIES

TO COUNSELLING

INTRODUCTION

Social health psychologists Hochbaum Rosenstock and Kegels in the 1950s while working for the Unites States’ Public Health Services developed the Health Belief Model (HBM) via the response to the failure of a free tuberculosis health screening program, which was an attempt to predict health-related behavior in terms of certain belief systems. Health belief state that the perception of a personal health behavior threat is itself influenced by at least three (3) factors: General health values, which include interest and concern about health; specific health belief about vulnerability to a particular health threat; and beliefs about the consequences of the health problem.

            HBM is a psychological model that attempts to explain and predict health behaviours. This is done by focusing on the attitudes and beliefs of individuals. It is the compass used to see the distant future of an individual and even the far past of the individual, as related to health. The HBM uses the life-style and attitude presented by an individual to predict the health condition of the person, be it of the past, the present or the future.

As the function of the dressing mirror, HBM is laid on the foundation of the understanding that an individual will take a health-related action like using condom if the individual feels that by adhering to that health-related action (use a condom), terrible health condition like HIV can be avoided.

Globally today, women have been made to believe that unless an individual is slim and has flesh at some specific parts of the body, the person is not beautiful. This belief came by through the mere fact that the world’s media acclaimed fashion models that are slim and the cloths they wear fits them to be the most beautiful women on earth. This believes came by because of the strivings to look beautiful and belonging and been loved and admired by men.

At the birth of this fashion-related life style, most women now belief and hold strongly that unless they are slim, they are not beautiful. Because of this, they watch what they eat, what they drink, how they eat and when they eat what. It gives them or makes them develop the sense of healthy living and careful eating. This is the positive side. While at the negative side, some women who, through their parent(s) grew up to be ‘fat’ and not naturally on the ‘slim’ side, usually ‘fight’ their way through to slimness by dangerously cutting down their food intake and as a result, some develop ulcer.

            Ultimately, women belief in get slim, get beautiful is making them to be healthy even when some do not have it in mind to work towards been healthy. This belief makes them to exercise more, drink lots of water, and eat less fat and sugar food.

APPLICATION TO COUNSELLING

Since counseling could be an inter-personal process design to bring about modification of feelings, cognition, attitudes and behaviours which have, over the time, prove trouble-some for the individual; the application of HBM in counseling is a pure and sure way of assisting clients with health-related troubles who consulted the counselor.

            For instance, when a client approach a counselor due to addiction in heavy smoking or drinking, the counselor during the counseling section could get more facts about the addiction by enquiring into the health belief system of the individual. If the individual is in the Military service where smoking is see as an act of been ‘awake’ and at best, especially during war, then with that information, the counselor could make the individual belief that the earlier belief system is not true.  Meanwhile, if individual perceives a threat to his/her health and is simultaneously cued to action and his/her perceived benefits outweigh his/her perceived benefits, then that individual is most likely to undertake the recommended prevention health action. Note that health belief model has been applied to all study all types of health behavior. For instance, individual’s motivation to undertake a health behavior can be see in three dimensions: individual perception; modifying behaviors; and likelihood of action.

Conception or/perception of individual: its usually bring to consciousness and affection that based on perception of illness or disease, importance of individual’s health, perception that deals with susceptible, and severity. The livelihood of action can be described as a factors in probability of appropriate health behavior; it is it duty to adhere to the recommended preventive health action. It is the result of above factors causes a response that usually manifests into action, as far as it is accompanied by a rational alternative course of action. 

CONCLUSION

Counselors with corrective motifs towards their profession or career would eagerly apply the methods adopted by the HBM for effective diagnosis of their client and proper treatment been administered. As mentioned above in my instruction, counseling is more like seeking truth using the dialogue-diagnosis method of seeking answers to, sometimes, hidden questions needed for proper ‘curing’ of client(s).

BY: EDOKA PETER-PAUL

WRITTEN AS A TERM PAPER SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF      PHILOSOPHY SAINTS PETER AND PAUL MAJOR SEMINARY,BODIJA, IBADAN  IN AFFILIATION WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN; JANUARY, 2011

SOURCES

1.     Becker, M. H., ed., (1974). “The Health Belief Model and Personal Health Behaviour.” Health Education Monographs2:324-473

2.     Harrison, J A.; Mullen, P. D.; and Green, L. W. (1992), A Meta-Analysis of Studies of the Health Belief Model in Health Behaviour and Health Education Research 7:107-116

3.     Champion, V. L. (1984), Instrument Development for Health Belief Model Constructs, Advances in Nursing Science, 6, 73-85

4.     Eisen, M et.al. (1992), A Health Belief Model— Social Learning Theory Approach to Adolescents’ Fertility Control: Findings from a Controlled Field Trial, Health Education Quarterly

5.     Rosenstock, I M. (1966), Why People Use Health Services, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 44:94-124

6.     Hochbaum, G. (1956), why people seek X-rays, Public Health Reports 71:377-38

Reflecting on Work Improves Job Performance

New research by Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano, and colleagues shows that taking time to reflect on our work improves job performance in the long run.

Many of us are familiar with the gentle punishment known as "time-out," in which misbehaving children must sit quietly for a few minutes, calm down, and reflect on their actions.

New research suggests that grown-ups ought to take routine time-outs of their own, not as a punishment, but in order to improve their job performance.

“Our work shows that if we'd take some time out for reflection, we might be better off.”

In the working paper Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance, the authors show how reflecting on what we've done teaches us to do it more effectively the next time around.

"Now more than ever we seem to be living lives where we're busy and overworked, and our research shows that if we'd take some time out for reflection, we might be better off," says Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino , who co-wrote the paper with Gary Pisano, the Harry E. Figgie Professor of Business Administration at HBS; Giada Di Stefano, an assistant professor at HEC Paris; and Bradley Staats, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School.

Pausing to reflect on our work improves job performance.
Photo: iStockPhoto

The research team conducted a series of three studies based on the dual-process theory of thought, which maintains that people think and learn using two distinct types of processes. Type 1 processes are heuristic—automatically learning by doing, such that the more people do something, the better they know how to do it. Type 2 processes, on the other hand, are consciously reflective, and are often associated with decision making.

Essentially, the researchers hypothesized that learning by doing would be more effective if deliberately coupled with learning by thinking. They also hypothesized that sharing information with others would improve the learning process.

REFLECTION, SHARING, AND SELF-EFFICACY

For the first study, the team recruited 202 adults for an online experiment in which they completed a series of brain teasers based on a "sum to ten" game. A round of problem solving included five puzzles, and participants earned a dollar for each puzzle they solved in 20 seconds or less.

After recording the results of the first problem-solving round, the researchers divided participants randomly into one of three conditions: control, reflection, and sharing.

In the control condition, participants simply completed another round of brain teasers.

In the reflection condition, participants took a few minutes to reflect on their first round of brain teasers, writing detailed notes about particular strategies they employed. Then they, too, completed a second round of puzzles.

In the sharing condition, participants received the same instructions as those in the reflection group, but with an additional message informing them that their notes would be shared with future participants.

Results showed that the reflection and sharing group performed an average of 18 percent better on the second round of brain teasers than the control group. However, there was no significant performance difference between the reflection and the sharing group. "In this case sharing on top of reflection doesn't seem to have a beneficial effect," Gino says. "But my sense was that if the sharing involved participants actually talking to each other, an effect might exist."

Next, the researchers recruited 178 university students to participate in the same experiment as the first study, but with two key differences: One, they were not paid based on their performance; rather, they all received a flat fee. Two, before starting the second round of brain teasers, they were asked to indicate the extent to which they felt "capable, competent, able to make good judgments, and able to solve difficult problems if they tried hard enough."

As in the first study, those in the sharing and reflection conditions performed better than those in the control group. Those who had reflected on their problem solving reportedly felt more competent and effective than those in the control group.

"When we stop, reflect, and think about learning, we feel a greater sense of self-efficacy," Gino says. "We're more motivated and we perform better afterward."

A FIELD EXPERIMENT

The final study tested the hypotheses in the real-world setting of Wipro, a business-process outsourcing company based in Bangalore, India. The experiment was conducted at a tech support call center.

The researchers studied several groups of employees in their initial weeks of training for a particular customer account. As with the previous experiments, each group was assigned to one of three conditions: control, reflection, and sharing. Each group went through the same technical training, with a couple of key differences.

In the reflection group, on the sixth through the 16th days of training, workers spent the last 15 minutes of each day writing and reflecting on the lessons they had learned that day. Participants in the sharing group did the same, but spent an additional five minutes explaining their notes to a fellow trainee. Those in the control condition just kept working at the end of the day, but did not receive additional training.

Over the course of one month, workers in both the reflection and sharing condition performed significantly better than those in the control group. On average, the reflection group increased its performance on the final training test by 22.8 percent than did the control group. The sharing group performed 25 percent better on the test than the control group, about the same increase as the reflection group.

This was in spite of the fact that the control group had been working 15 minutes longer per day than the other groups, who had spent that time reflecting and sharing instead.

Gino hopes that the research will provide food for thought to overworked managers and employees alike.

"I don't see a lot of organizations that actually encourage employees to reflect—or give them time to do it," Gino says. "When we fall behind even though we're working hard, our response is often just to work harder. But in terms of working smarter, our research suggests that we should take time for reflection."

About the author

Carmen Nobel is senior editor of HBS Working Knowledge