Exploring dimensions of health behaviors’ representations

Abstract

Objectives: To discover underlying dimensions of health behavior representations and to suggest a new framework for their investigation.

Methods: A total of 1709 participants rated 45 health behaviors on 14 theoretical constructs denoting features by which individuals can cognitively represent health behaviors. Correlations among constructs were aggregated across behaviors using a meta-analytic approach, and subjected to factor analysis.

Results: The analysis resulted in three interpretable dimensions: ‘Importance’, ‘Negative Experience’ and ‘Ease’, and one tentative factor, ‘Other’.

Conclusion: ‘Importance’, ‘Negative Experience’ and ‘Ease’ may be considered key dimensions for studying perceptions of health behaviors within a self-regulatory framework. These dimensions suggest new integrative and parsimonious ways for investigating health behaviors. The findings also highlight the importance of expanding the category of health behaviors to include psycho-social behaviors (e.g. stress management, social relationships), and the need for theoretical refinement of affective constructs anticipated during and after performance of health behaviors. This may improve the understanding and potential modification of health behaviors.

Keywords:

• Health behaviors
• theory development
• cognitive representations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ‘Representations’ and ‘perceptions’ are used in the article interchangeably.

2 Detailed information about the constructs and behaviors is presented in the Methods.

3 This article contains a partial reanalysis of data previously used to identify ‘cognitive profiles’ of health behavior clusters (Nudelman & Shiloh, 2016).

4 Panels, http://www.panelsltd.com/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation under Grant number 257/11.