The Health Belief Model

According to Carpenter (2010), the beginnings of the health belief model (HBM) can be traced to the 1950s when concerns among U.S. public health service providers bordered towards the lack of concern among members of the public about their physical and psychological health in regards to involvement in preventive and disease detection programs. To address the problem, a conglomerate of U.S. social psychologists developed the HBM from a combination of several behavioral theories among them the Kurt Lewin and colleague’s theory, Rotter’s Reinforcement Model, Edward’s Subjective Expected Utility Model, and Tolman’s Performance Behaviour Theory among many more (Carpenter, 2010). The Health Belief Model Paper

In total there are six constructs of the HBM as follows; (a) Perceived susceptibility: regards individuals the belief that harm will occur due to behavior. (b) Perceived severity: the belief that certain extent of harm can result from a disease developed by behavior. (c) Perceived benefits: belief in the advantages of interventions suggested towards reducing the harm of particular behavior. (d) Perceived barriers: The belief in actual or imagined costs of the intervention behavior.  (e) Cues to action: The willingness or need for an individual to take action in implementing intervention behavior. (f) Self-efficacy: The confidence an individual has in the abilities to pursue intervention behavior (Carpenter, 2010). The premise of this paper is to review the application of HBM in two research papers as advanced by Rossen et al. (2015) and Koch (2002).