A review of similarities between domain-specific determinants of four health behaviors among adolescents

Abstract

Schools are overloaded with health promotion programs that, altogether, focus on a broad array of behavioral domains, including substance abuse, sexuality and nutrition. Although the specific content of programs varies according to the domain focus, programs usually address similar concepts: knowledge, attitudinal beliefs, social influences and skills. This apparent conceptual overlap between behaviors and programs provides opportunities for a transfer-oriented approach which will stimulate students to apply the knowledge and skills they have learned in one domain (e.g. skills for resisting tobacco use) to other domains (e.g. alcohol, sex). A requirement for such an approach is that behaviors share at least some determinants. This review addresses this issue by examining similarities between domain-specific determinants of smoking, drinking, safe sex and healthy nutrition among adolescents. Recent empirical studies and reviews were examined. The results show that the following determinants are relevant to all four behaviors: beliefs about immediate gratification and social advantages, peer norms, peer and parental modeling and refusal self-efficacy. Several other determinants have been found to relate to at least two behaviors, e.g. health risk beliefs and parental norms. These results can be used for the development of a transfer-oriented school health promotion curriculum.

Principled Promotion of Health: Implementing Five Guiding Health Promotion Principles for Research-Based Prevention and Management of Diabetes

“…The perpetual risk of exclusively reaching the people who are already being reached by other health interventions and campaigns [37,38] has been an active concern in many of our projects. This is, however, where the fifth principle of equity in health really makes a difference by always reminding us that, no matter what we do, we should always focus on not running the risk of making the difference between the healthy and the unhealthy greater than it already is.…”

Parkour as Health Promotion in Schools: A Qualitative Study on Health Identity

“…Health promotion in schools often fails to engage and involve pupils in ways that affect learning and behaviour (Grabowski, 2013a(Grabowski, , 2013bGrabowski & Rasmussen 2014b;Peters et al, 2009;Wistoft, 2010). Research in the area suggests that initiatives incorporating a focus on identity are more likely to succeed in generating engagement, participation and involvement and thereby to affect learning outcomes and behaviour change (Grabowski & Rasmussen, 2014b;Harrell-Levy & Kerpelman, 2010;Taylor, 1991).…”

Health Identity: Theoretical and empirical development of a health education concept

“…This often results in misconceived campaigns and approaches that have little or no effect on acquisition of health knowledge or changes in health behaviour. More often than not, such campaigns and approaches only manage to appeal to children and adolescents who are already healthy, and therefore there is a risk that they will serve to increase the difference between those who are healthy and those who are not (Peters et al, 2009;Grabowski, 2013b;Grabowski & Rasmussen, 2014b).…”