Health Belief Model

In the BioMed Central Journal of public health, authors Zhi-Juan Cao, Yue Chen, and Shu-Mei Wang evaluated community-based education programs of injury prevention among high school students based on the Health Belief Model. The purpose of this article is to reveal that even though there are a variety of community-based programs, there are not enough evaluations of how effective these various community-based programs are. In order to investigate how effective community-based health education is on students’ health beliefs, a pre-intervention and post-intervention survey was conducted.
First, a questionnaire was tested on 100 students to see the different types of health beliefs that high school students had about major injury types and whether
The model consists of two aspects of injury prevention, which includes threat perception and behavioral evaluation. Threat perception is how susceptible an individual is to an injury as well as how severe an individual perceives the consequences of an injury to be. Behavioral evaluation includes cues to action, which means the barriers that change the injury-related behaviors. The Health Behavior Model consists of five factors concerning injury prevention including perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits of taking action, perceived barriers to taking action, and cues to action. First, perceived susceptibility is how an individual perceives the likelihood of getting an injury. An individual with a low perception of susceptibility does not expect to experience any injuries but an individual with a high perception of susceptibility expects to experience great amounts of injury. Perceived severity is how an individual perceives the seriousness of getting an injury and the outcomes of getting an injury for not only the individual but as well as those around the individual. The seriousness would be created based on the amount of burden and difficulties that the injury might cause for the individual’s social or work life. Perceived benefits of taking action is what comes after an individual accepts the susceptibility and seriousness of getting injured and is the individual’s belief about whether their action would decrease the risks of getting injured. Perceived barriers to taking action would be an individual’s belief that there may be negative factors if preventative measures were taken toward one’s actions. Those barriers may also cause an individual to not take any action. Cues to action can be internal or external factors that push an individual to take action such as posters or advertisements. Using the Health Behavior Model with these