Question

Describe how the constructs in the Health Belief Model provide rationale for the constructs of Motivation, Ability, and Triggers found in Fogg’s Behavior Model.

Answer 1

The Health Belief Model (HBM) is a psychological model that attempts to explain and predict health behaviors. This is done by focusing on the attitudes and beliefs of individuals. The HBM was first developed in the 1950s by social psychologists Hochbaum, Rosenstock and Kegels working in the U.S. Public Health Services.

The HBM has four constructs representing the perceived threat and net benefits: perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, and perceived barriers. These concepts were proposed as accounting for people's "readiness to act." An added concept, cues to action, would activate that readiness and stimulate overt behavior. A recent addition to the HBM is the concept of self-efficacy, or one's confidence in the ability to successfully perform an action. This concept was added by Rosenstock and others in 1988 to help the HBM better fit the challenges of changing habitual unhealthy behaviors, such as being sedentary, smoking, or overeating.

Perceived Susceptibility refers to the probability that an individual assigns to personal vulnerability to developing the health condition. In order words, it is the subjective belief a person has regarding the likelihood of acquiring a disease or harmful state as a result of indulging in a particular behavior.

Perceived Severity refers to how serious an individual believes the consequences of developing the health condition will be. It deals with an individual’s subjective belief in the extent of harm that can be caused from acquiring the disease or unhealthy state, as a result of a particular behavior.

Perceived Benefit refers to an individual’s subjective opinion of the value or usefulness of enacting a health behavior to offset the perceived threat. Under perceived benefit, motivation to take action to change a behavior requires the belief that the precautionary behavior will effectively prevent the condition.

Perceived Barrier refers to an individual’s subjective evaluation of the difficulties or the hindrances associated with the target behavior. With perceived barrier, an individual may not perform a behavior despite his/her belief about the effectiveness (benefit) of taking the action in reducing the threat if the barrier outweighs the benefit.

Self Efficacy is a term that is used to describe an individual’s belief about his/her ability to perform the behavior in question.

The Fogg Behaviour Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing.

Clearly the constructs of health belief model provide a rationale for the constructs of Motivation, Ability and Trigger in the Fogg Behavior Model.

Perceived threat and benefits will account for the Motivation, Perceived barriers and self efficacy for the Ability component and Perceived severity as a Trigger for the behavior to be performed.