Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Abstract

The research of Multiple Health Behavior Change (MHBC) and related mechanisms was important for promoting people to adopt and maintain more health behaviors. Most literatures provided some explanations for the relationships of these multiple behaviors, few of which explicitly incorporated motivational variables as mediators into models or intervene study. Thus we focused mainly on two issues in the framework of motivation hierarchical model and global health category. One was the mechanism of the relationship between dieting and exercising, which aimed to confirm the cross-domain applications of the two processes of top-down and down-top. The other one investigated which was the gateway behavior. We adopted two methods, three-time-point longitudinal design and two intervention studies, to investigate above-mentioned goals. The questionnaire study confirmed the model ?exercise behavior? exercise motivation ? global motivation ? dieting motivation ? dieting behavior?, which manifested the down-top and top-down processes. The mechanism from dieting to exercise was similar to that from exercise to dieting mentioned above. The first intervention study examined whether the intervention of dieting would have an effect on exercise through motivations. The second intervention study examined the effect of the intervention of exercise on dieting through motivations. That was to say, the intervention on dieting would lead to improvement on untouched exercise and vice versa. The contribution of the present study lay on providing one of explanations about the relationships among multiple behaviors, which would be helpful for future intervention design. Keywords: Multiple health behavior; Motivation hierarchical model; Gateway behavior

Biography

Tingting Gan is a graduate student at the Department of Psychology, Peking University, China.