Health Education Research Advance Access originally published online on January 4, 2005
Health Education Research 2005 20(3):294-297; doi:10.1093/her/cyg125
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Health Education Research Vol.20 no.3, © Oxford University Press 2004; All rights reserved
Commentary: Revitalizing research on health behavior theories
1 Department of Human Ecology, Cook College, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8520 and 2 Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
3 Correspondence to: N. D. Weinstein; E-mail: neilw@aesop.rutgers.edu
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Introduction |
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Noar and Zimmerman's article ‘Health behavior theory and cumulative knowledge regarding health behavior: are we moving in the right direction?’ (Noar and Zimmerman, 2005
) provides an informative, but disturbing, analysis of research in this area. Despite thousands of studies that use or test specific theories of health behavior [see (Noar and Zimmerman, 2005), Figure 1], innovations and advances have been quite modest. The extent to which theories have become more accurate is uncertain. In fact, comparing initial statements of the dominant theories of health behavior with current descriptions of those same theories reveals remarkably few substantive changes. Why has there been so little progress? We believe that there are two broad classes of explanations: weaknesses in the research designs and analyses used in much of this research, and problems with how investigators approach the overall research enterprise.
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What have we been doing? Problems in research design and analysis |
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Tests of health behavior theories too often fail to give careful
Problems with research designs
Problems with theory tests
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How do we move forward? Re-examining our approach to health behavior research |
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