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Introduction
Since its comprehensive review was published in Health Education Monographs in 1974, the health belief model (HBM) has become the focus of attention both on the theoretical aspects and on its use in research practice (Janz and Becker, 1984). HBM is one of the most commonly used behavioral change theories other than the social cognitive theory (SCT), theory of reasoned action (TRA), and trans theoretical model (Zimmerman and Vernberg, 1994; Painter et al., 2008). Four reviews of trends in the use of behavioral theory and health education conducted on theoretical articles published between 1986 and 2005 found that HBM always occupies the top five position as the most widely used theories other than social learning theory, SCT, TRA and theory of planned behavior (Champion and Skinner, 2008).
HBM has four main constructs, i.e., perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits and perceived barriers (Rosenstock, 1966). This model states that if an individual has high perceived susceptibility and perceived severity to a health problem, perceives target behavior to have positive benefits in reducing the emergence of health problems, and perceives barriers to adopting target behavior which is fairly low, she or he will then be likely to adopt such health behavior (Rosenstock, 1966; Champion and Skinner, 2008).
HBM has been used extensively as a conceptual framework in behavioral health research, both as a framework for designing interventions and for predicting changes in health behaviors (Champion, 1987; Munro et al., 2007; Taylor et al., 2007; Tanner-Smith and Brown, 2010; Shojaeizadeh et al., 2011; Jalilian et al., 2013; Poorolajal et al., 2013; Jones et al., 2014; Jeihooni et al., 2015; Tarkang and Zotor, 2015). Over the past three decades, HBM has been much developed, compared to other frameworks, and often used to support health behavior change interventions (Champion and Skinner, 2008; Jones et al., 2014). However, several studies have identified a number of significant limitations of HBM in predicting behavioral changes. One very important limitation is precisely related to the validity of HBM variables as a behavioral predictor (Johnson et al., 2008). This scoping review was conducted to map the validity of HBM variables in predicting behavioral changes based on available synthesized evidences.
Methods
Scoping review (also called...