Health performance of individuals within the Campbell paradigm

Abstract

In this paper, we developed a comprehensive health performance measure that formally links individual health attitudes with the likelihood of engaging in a wide variety of health-related behaviours from various domains such as sustenance, hygiene, and physical exercise. Within what Kaiser, Byrka, and Hartig (2010) call the Campbell paradigm, we equated general health attitude with what a person does to retain or promote his or her health. Thus, health behaviours, on one hand, were expected to form a homogeneous, transitively ordered class of behaviours. On the other hand, the very behavioural class was in turn thought to be the basis from which an individual's health attitude could be directly assessed. A sample of 391 adults provided us with survey data containing different sets of health behaviours as well as variables and personality measures that had been corroborated as health-behaviour relevant in previous research. We found that self-reports of 50 behaviours and expressions of appreciation for 20 of these behaviours from various domains formed a transitively ordered class of activities. In contrast to the conventional view in health psychology, in which attitudes are regarded as a psychological cause behind individual behaviour, and in contrast to conventional findings in health psychology, where behaviours appear to fall into numerous sets of more or less distinct domains of health-enhancing activities (e.g., exercising or avoiding risks), our findings speak of the psychological and formal unity of health behaviour. Inevitably, attitude measures grounded in the Campbell paradigm gauge individual attitudes, and just as much, they measure the health performance of individuals.

How green defaults promote environmentally friendly decisions: Attitude‐conditional default acceptance but attitude‐unconditional effects on actual choices

“…Whereas much of current attitude research draws on evaluative statements (for a recent discussion, see Otto, Kröhne, & Richter, ), classic conceptions such as Rosenberg and Hovland's tripartite model of attitude () suggest that behavioral self‐reports can be valid indicators of people's attitudes. In a recent empirical test, Kaiser, Merten, and Wetzel () have shown that the behavioral items from the General Ecological Behavior scale (e.g., “I bring empty bottles to a recycling bin”)—our attitude measure in the present research—along with 48 evaluative and normative statements (e.g., “Bringing empty bottles to a recycling bin is good … bad ”) can be combined in a single, Rasch‐homogenous scale of indicators to assess people's environmental attitude (for parallel evidence from another attitude domain see Byrka & Kaiser, ).…”

Context-appropriate environmental attitude measurement in Nigeria using the Campbell paradigm

“…Decades after it was initially proposed, Campbell's idea has made a resurgence in psychology as a theoretical framework termed the 'Campbell paradigm' (Kaiser et al 2010;Byrka and Kaiser 2013;Urban 2016). The Campbell paradigm conceptualizes the performance of a behaviour as a combined function of the situational threshold (behavioural difficulty or costs) associated with the realization of the behaviour and the level of a person's attitude or disposition to pursue the attitudinal goal reflected by the behaviour (Kaiser et al 2010).…”

“…where the natural logarithm of the ratio of the probability of person k's engagement (pki) relative to the probability of non-engagement (1pki) in a specific behaviour i is given by the difference between k's attitude level (θk) and the difficulty of the behaviour (δi) (Byrka 2009;Kaiser et al 2010). In this mathematical representation, people are distinguishable with respect to their attitudes (regardless of the behavioural indicators considered in the measurement procedure), and behaviours are distinguishable by how difficult they are to realize (irrespective of the persons considered; Kaiser et al 2013).…”

Attitudes and Defaults Save Lives and Protect the Environment Jointly and Compensatorily: Understanding the Behavioral Efficacy of Nudges and Other Structural Interventions

“…Recognizing an attitude therefore requires the empirical identification of a set of behaviors that represent what people commonly do to implement the strength of a specific personal attitude (e.g., toward organ donation; see Figure 1). Note that empirically identifying sets of behaviors that are—due to their costs—transitively ordered is not a trivial matter as it can fail (for typical successful examples, see [11,12,13]).…”