Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Researchers in disparate disciplines are concerned with preventive health behaviors - defined as actions seemingly healthy individuals undertake for the sole purpose of preventing or detecting disease before symptom presentation. To explain willingness to engage in preventive health behaviors, scholars developed several social psychological frameworks, perhaps the most well known and highly influential of which is the Health Belief Model (HBM) (Rosenstock, 1960, 1974; Becker, 1974a, 1974b; Mikhail, 1981). Although application of the HBM is appropriate to myriad preventive health behaviors among men and women, it has been particularly directive to researchers studying women's health issues.
Two such health issues, which can have devastating and deadly consequence, are breast and cervical cancers. For instance, these cancers claimed the lives of over 44 000 US women in 2008 (American Cancer Society, 2009) and some decedents would have survived if their malignancies had been detected earlier and a proper treatment regimen implemented. The good news is that women at risk are encouraged to be regularly screened and many women comply with recommendations. For example, in 2005 the per cent of US women over the age of 40 that reported having a mammogram in the past 2 years was 67 per cent (National Center for Health Statistics, 2009, p. 348). Similarly, in 2005, the per cent of US women over the age of 18 that reported having a Papanicolaou (pap) screening in the past 3 years was 78 per cent (National Center for Health Statistics, 2009, p. 350). A lesser per cent of breast cancer as compared to cervical screening occurs because the latter is often required for prescription of oral contraceptives.
The objective of the present literature review is to evaluate utility of the HBM by critically examining empirical studies investigating mammographic and pap screening. The problem is this: application of the HBM to breast and cervical cancer and women's preventive health behaviors has spanned such a wide array of disciplines with distinct goals and methodologies and underlying assumptions that it is difficult to summarize the findings. Thus, we review 39 studies invoking the HBM to predict mammographic and pap screening. We improve upon previously published literature reviews that omitted some studies and/or failed to critically summarize reported empirical results (see, for example, Gillam, 1991; Curry...