Both act contrastingly where the higher the perceived benefits, the more likely will the individual take on the healthy behaviour and vice versa (Boslaugh, 2014). Cues to actions are internal or external factors that motivates or triggers an individual to engage in a behaviour such as seeing a poster (Bishop et al., 2014). Lastly, self-efficacy is the individual’s belief of having the ability or competency to succeed in a course of action whereby the higher the self-efficacy, the more likely will the individual take action (Bishop et al., 2014; Straub & Leahy, 2014). Modifying factors such as socioeconomic and demographic variables influences the contents of the six constructs (Roden, 2004). This essay aims to identify and elaborate on the strengths and weakness of HBM in understanding and promoting behaviour …show more content…
The effect size of HBM’s constructs were found to be small, ranging at approximately 0.2 (Abraham & Sheeran, 2005; Orji, Vassileva, & Mandryk, 2012). With a small effect size, the outcome of the intervention is largely unexplained by HBM, implying that there are other more significant variables unidentified in the HBM that contributes to the behaviour change (Orji, Vassileva, & Mandryk, 2012). Not to mention, some of the constructs were found to be weak in predictability while others were strong. For instance, perceived severity is found to be a weak predictor while perceived benefits and barriers were strong predictors of behaviour (Carpenter, 2010). This lack of homogeneity in the constructs implies that some constructs may not be a necessary component of the HBM, therefore questioning the validity of this framework. With the weak predictability of HBM, it has been suggested that perceived severity and susceptibility indirectly influence behaviour (Janz & Becker, 1984), opposing the view that the HBM constructs impacts behaviour directly. This adds on to more complication on the operation of