Yingwattanakul Preecha, Moschis George P
College of Management, Mahidol University, 69 Vipawadee-Rangsit Road, Phayathai, Bangkok, 10400, Thailand.
Marketing Department, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA.
J Prim Prev. 2017 Oct;38(5):537-550. doi: 10.1007/s10935-017-0482-7.
Preventive healthcare is considered a cornerstone of good health and well-being that can play a major role in reducing a country's healthcare costs and improving both the length and quality of people's lives. Previous research on preventive healthcare behaviors has been predominantly cross-sectional, ignoring the dynamic nature of people's health behaviors over a full life span. As a result, the reasons for the development, stability, and changes of individuals' preventive healthcare behaviors over time remain relatively unknown. Our article contends that to understand the degree of people's engagement in preventive healthcare behaviors, we must understand the origins, continuity, and discontinuity of such behaviors. We offer the life course paradigm as a viable framework for studying preventive healthcare behaviors at different stages in life. Based on theory and previous research, our article proposes that the onset, continuity, and changes in preventive healthcare behaviors are the outcomes of physical, social, and emotional demands triggered by life events that require adaptation through the mechanisms of socialization, stress and coping, and human development. These mechanisms are the underlying change processes of the three main life course theoretical perspectives-normative, stress, and human capital, respectively. Our paper discusses implications of adopting the life course approach for theory and practice, and offers a research agenda in the form of general propositions and conceptual directions for future research.
预防性医疗保健被视为健康和幸福的基石，在降低一个国家的医疗成本以及提高人们的寿命和生活质量方面可以发挥重要作用。先前关于预防性医疗保健行为的研究主要是横断面研究，忽视了人们在整个生命周期中健康行为的动态性质。因此，个体预防性医疗保健行为随时间发展、稳定和变化的原因仍然相对不明。我们的文章认为，要了解人们参与预防性医疗保健行为的程度，我们必须了解此类行为的起源、连续性和间断性。我们提供生命历程范式作为研究人生不同阶段预防性医疗保健行为的可行框架。基于理论和先前的研究，我们的文章提出，预防性医疗保健行为的开始、连续性和变化是由生活事件引发的身体、社会和情感需求的结果，这些需求需要通过社会化、压力与应对以及人类发展机制来适应。这些机制分别是生命历程三个主要理论视角——规范视角、压力视角和人力资本视角——的潜在变化过程。我们的论文讨论了采用生命历程方法对理论和实践的影响，并以一般命题和未来研究概念方向的形式提供了一个研究议程。
