1. Produce "fear"
(1) Perceived severity: it is a very personal and subjective assessment of the consequences of the disease, including two intersecting dimensions: the personal consequences caused by the disease, including the severity of pain, the possibility of skill damage and the probability of death; Social consequences caused by the disease: including the impact on the current family, job loss, emotional pain of the whole family and social relations. The resulting fear. This belief may be the motive factor that makes health problems seem very important. Those who think that smoking will lead to lung cancer and death may have the motivation to quit smoking. However, sometimes we find that according to people's understanding of the severity of the disease, they don't seem to engage in preventive behavior more often.
(2) Perceptual susceptibility: it is our personal assessment of the probability of contracting a certain disease. Its scale depends on the individual's subjective feelings about health and disease. If the incidence of certain diseases is high and the epidemic range is wide, the susceptibility will be great. But people often ignore those remote and unlikely hazards (for example, young people think that lung cancer caused by smoking will not occur until they are 60 or 70 years old). How to make them form the belief of disease susceptibility through factual evaluation and subjective judgment is the key to the success or failure of health education and health promotion.
During the SARS epidemic, people often take the initiative to take preventive measures because they understand the seriousness and susceptibility of the disease.
2. Behavior effect expectation
(1) Perceived benefits: It is not enough to only realize the harmfulness and severity. Only when people realize the cost of giving up harmful behaviors (such as time, burden, perseverance, etc. ) can really get the effect of prevention, that is, the timeliness of behavior, so that people can take action and have a clear way and route of action. There is a family with a high risk of coronary heart disease, but even after a serious heart attack, he still drinks and smokes too much. For him, the cost of giving up his lifestyle far outweighs the danger of death. He said realistically that he would rather die than change.
(2) Perception obstacle: People realize that the difficulty of taking health promotion behavior is a necessary prerequisite for consolidating and lasting behavior. If some preventive actions are expensive, painful and inconvenient, they should be pointed out realistically to help people overcome them one by one. Smokers may think that the risk of lung cancer makes it worthwhile to quit smoking, and they themselves have this risk. However, they may be unwilling to bear the withdrawal symptoms of cigarettes, and may think that quitting smoking will lead to annoying weight gain or lose the friendship of those friends who smoke. All these will create obstacles to quitting smoking.
Recent research shows that information that emphasizes cost is more likely to stimulate the behavior of exploring diseases; Information that emphasizes interests is more likely to stimulate health protection behavior.
Rosenstock, an American psychologist, said: "The perception of susceptibility and severity really provides motivation for action; But only when the public realizes the benefits and understands the difficulties first, and then makes up his mind to overcome them, can he really find a way to change his behavior. "
3. Performance expectations
(1) Self-efficacy: Have a correct evaluation and judgment of your own abilities, and believe that you can successfully carry out an action that can lead to the expected results (such as quitting smoking) through your own efforts.
(2) Be good at finding other available forces, such as education, family members and group help, to indirectly help achieve the expected effect and efficiency, thus affecting behavior change.
To sum up, the health belief model mainly follows three steps: first, fully make people feel fear of bad behavior (perception of danger and severity); Secondly, let people firmly believe that once they change their bad behavior, they will get very valuable consequences (perceived benefits), and at the same time clearly realize the possible difficulties (perceived obstacles) in behavior change; Finally, make people feel confident and have the ability to change bad behavior (self-efficacy) through long-term efforts. Research shows that this model may be more suitable for the upper social and economic groups with higher education level than the average.