Theories Of Health Behavior For Stress Management In University Students Essay.

Health belief model

Discuss about the Physical or Mental Stability and Trigger.

Stress is as a psychological response to stimulus that disturbs our physical or mental stability and triggers adverse reactions in an individual. One stressful event might trigger to fight-or-flight response leading to the release of adrenaline and cortisol hormone. Chronic stress begins to have negative impact on physical and mental well-being of individual. In order to manage stress and change health behavior of affected person, understanding about different theories of health behavior is necessary to reduce stress and improve well-being of University students (Thoits, 2013). This literature review will particularly discuss two of the five theories of health behavior that might influence stress management practice of students.

In psychology, health professionals base their intervention based on several health behavior model that aim to identify people’s behavior based on various variables. This health behavior model explains the reason behind people’s engagement in health promoting or health compromising behavior. The five theories of health behavior- health belief model, protection motivation theory of health, theory of reasoned action, theories of health behavior and theories of planned behavior are all influenced by social-cognitive concept. All these theories mainly explain the health belief of individuals that might be risk health and increase their susceptibility to illness (Prestwich et al., 2014). This literature review particularly looks at the health belief model and the protection motivation theory of health to determine its impact on reducing stress and improving well-being of students.

One of the theories related to human behavior is the health belief model which focus on the fact that people’s health related action is based on six factors which are as follows:

• Perceived susceptibility- it is an a person’s belief that they are likely to contract an illness
• Perceived severity - It is perceived impact of illness on peoples life
• Perceived benefits of health behavior- One’s belief on the benefits of an advised action to reduce the impact of illness
• Perceived barriers/ costs of health behavior- people’s perception about the psychological cost an action or treatment
• Cues to action- strategies taken to activate readiness to a health behavior
• Self-efficacy-confidence on one’s ability to modify their health behavior.

Hence this factors indicate that the health behavior is determines by individual’s personal belief about illness and the strategies taken by them to reduce its occurrence. These perceptions are also modified by variable like culture, education level, past experience and motivation (Skinner, Tiro, & Champion, 2015).

One research literature focused on applying the concepts the health belief model to explore stress management in University students. Stress has affected college students in many ways. It has lead to chronic health conditions, poor quality of life, reduced productivity and poor individual morale (King et al., 2012). The researcher indicated that all this had been due to psychological and emotional problem in individuals such as anxiety, depression and frustration. College students are most vulnerable to negative consequences because college is a stressful time in their life. They have found to suffer from academic performance impairment, increased anxiety and decrease in life satisfaction due to academic stress of competing for the highest grades. They start experiencing physical and psychological impairments frequently (Baghurst & Kelley, 2014). The research applied the components of perceived benefits, perceived barriers and cues to action of health belief model in coping with stress. The purpose of the research was to analyze if student’s habit of stress management techniques differs based on the three constructs of health belief model. The coping strategies employed according to this research included breathing exercises, emotional support, acceptance, problem focused coping, emotional focused coping, mindfulness and many others. The results indicated that most helpful techniques for reducing stress in university students included listening to music, exercise and taking deep breaths. It was also found that frequency of stress management differs based on the core concept of the model. This research gave the implication that more research should be done to promote frequent use of stress management techniques among University students (King et al., 2012).

Research by Ryff, (2013) investigated the efficacy of health belied model to address negative functioning in individual due to presence of stressors in life and enable them to realize personal capacity and talent. It gave idea about how psychological well-being is affected by changes across adult development. Personality correlates was regarded as an important predictor of well being in individual. The health belief model has the concept that one’s perception about illness affects their health behavior and this research showed that it is this perceptions are also created due to experiences in family.  Therefore the challenges of stress and reducing risk of complication are dependent personal traits like resilience which help people to manage adversities in life and attain positive psychological outcome. The study was useful as it gave the implication that psychological well-being is dependent on resisting social pressures and regulating behavior, competence in managing environment, feeling of modifying self-behavior, engaging in trusting relationship with others and having a positive attitude towards life.

Protection motivation theory

Regehr, Glancy, & Pitts, (2013) looked at the possible approach to reduce stress in University students. This research was important due to the high rate of anxiety and depression among university students and low percentage of student seeking treatment from university health services. The research investigated the efficacy of different treatment in relieving stress in university students through meta-analysis and the result gave idea about cognitive, behavioral and mindfulness based interventions to decrease symptoms of anxiety and stress. The limitation of the research was that it over-represented interventions with female students and some intervention did not have sufficient data for analysis. The usefulness of this research is that it provides evidence based interventions to reduce stress and which would encourage universities to develop stress reduction program for university students.

Protection motivation theory is based on the idea that individuals tend to protect themselves based on factors of perceived probability of occurrence, perceived severity of threatening events, perceived self-efficacy and efficacy of preventive behavior. This motivation originates both from threat appraisal and coping appraisal. The former evaluates severity of a situation while the assessed response to the situation (Mullan et al., 2015). Therefore through this approach health behavior can be modified by sustaining protective behavior.

Protection motivation theory might help in attitude change and stress management in university students by making them aware of the variable in the theory that can influence cognitive appraisal process. Review of the theory in research literature reveals that it has the advantage of addressing fear and attitudes of people with psychological problems due to stress and anxiety (Posey et al., 2013).

Research by De Castella, Byrne, & Covington, (2013) investigated the impact of this theory to manage factors that lead to anxiety in university students. They develop symptoms of anxiety due to fear of failure, competition for good grades in exams and success orientation. Although success orientation is good for developing self-worth of students, however it is that way that their fear of failure interacts that make them vulnerable to stress and underachievement in college. This research tried to employ the protective behavior technique of need achievement to determine how this are related to stress and other symptoms in vulnerable people. Study with Japanese students showed that their helplessness were low in success orientation but high in fear of failure. Therefore the research gave the idea that success orientation might help students to overcome of failure and reduce their anxiety. Therefore the research was successful in demonstrating that fear of failure is a maladaptive self-protective strategy and students should engage in positive application of motivation to achievement dynamics.

Another research literature tried to reduce stressors in University students by studying the relation between study engagement and intrinsic motivation. The main purpose was get insight into the psychological capital of students. The research was done by two studies, one evaluating the relation between psychological capital and study engagement and other investigating the intrinsic motivation as a factor leading to study engagement. Through the analysis of data, the results showed that motivation technique like dedication, absorption and vigor can help to reduce anxiety and increase study engagement in university students (Siu, Bakker, & Jiang, 2014). Hence, the study gave the implications that intrinsic motivation can be a significant mediator of study engagement in students.

Conclusion

From the literature review on the theories of health belief model and protection motivation theory, it can be concluded that this theories can be affectively applied in stress management and improving psychological well-being of university students. Review of several research studies gave the implication that different means of stress management techniques have helped student to reduce symptoms of stress and anxiety and overcome their fear of failure. Some research was useful in providing techniques that university health service program could employ to manage stress in university life and be confidence by adapting intrinsic motivation factors. This literature review gives the implication that more research should be done to think of ways to increase the frequency of stress management techniques in University students.

Reference

Baghurst, T., & Kelley, B. C. (2014). An examination of stress in college students over the course of a semester. Health promotion practice, 15(3), 438-447.

De Castella, K., Byrne, D., & Covington, M. (2013). Unmotivated or motivated to fail? A cross-cultural study of achievement motivation, fear of failure, and student disengagement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(3), 861.

King, K. A., Singh, M., Bernard, A., Merianos, A. L., & Vidourek, R. A. (2012). Employing The Health Belief Model To Examine Stress Management Among College Students. American Journal of Health Studies, 27(4).

Mullan, B., Norman, P., Boer, H., & Seydel, E. (2015). Protection motivation theory.

Posey, C., Roberts, T., Lowry, P. B., Bennett, B., & Courtney, J. (2013). Insiders’ protection of organizational information assets: Development of a systematics-based taxonomy and theory of diversity for protection-motivated behaviors. Mis Quarterly, 37(4), 1189-1210.

Prestwich, A., Sniehotta, F. F., Whittington, C., Dombrowski, S. U., Rogers, L., & Michie, S. (2014). Does theory influence the effectiveness of health behavior interventions? Meta-analysis. Health Psychology, 33(5), 465.

Regehr, C., Glancy, D., & Pitts, A. (2013). Interventions to reduce stress in university students: A review and meta-analysis. Journal of affective disorders, 148(1), 1-11.

Ryff, C. D. (2013). Psychological well-being revisited: Advances in the science and practice of eudaimonia. Psychotherapy and psychosomatics, 83(1), 10-28.

Siu, O. L., Bakker, A. B., & Jiang, X. (2014). Psychological capital among university students: Relationships with study engagement and intrinsic motivation. Journal of Happiness Studies, 15(4), 979-994.

Skinner, C. S., Tiro, J., & Champion, V. L. (2015). The health belief model. Health Behavior: Theory, Research, and Practice. John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco, CA, 75-94.

Thoits, P. A. (2013). Self, identity, stress, and mental health. In Handbook of the sociology of mental health (pp. 357-377). Springer Netherlands.