Exploring Cues to Action in Health Belief Model

Abstract

The Health Belief Model (HBM) has played a key role in describing, explaining, and predicting health-related outcomes. As one of the major health behavior theories, HBM has been well applied in numerous health-related studies. However, these studies often ignore the original conception of HBM as a theoretical model because they focus mainly on the predictive roles of risk perception variables – i.e., perceived susceptibility, severity, benefit, and barrier. Within that process, cues to action has not been comprehensively studied. The current study addresses these limitations in HBM research in two ways: (1) following the original conception of HBM and the recommendation by previous researchers, we did not use risk perception constructs as separate predictors but rather used perceived threat (perceived severity×perceived susceptibility) and perceived evaluation of action (perceived benefit-barrier); (2) we explored both internal and external cues in predicting health-related outcome and separated out interpersonal and media cues from external cues. Path analysis of 992 representative Korean adult samples in the context of tuberculosis (TB) revealed three major findings: (1) Interpersonal and (2) media cues are related to TB screening intention directly and indirectly through perceived threat; (3) perceived threat, but not perceived evaluation of action, is significantly related to TB screening intention. Theoretical and practical implications for our findings are discussed.