Individual health behaviors are increasingly important to personal well-being and future health risk. Health psychologists often seek to intervene at the level of the individual in order to modify behavior.
Here are the tasks you will need to accomplish in order to complete this project. They are broken down into smaller assignments on Canvas with more detailed instructions and a rubric, but this provides an overview of each component:
1. After reviewing the attached list, select a specific health behavior whose frequency you wish to either increase or decrease. You may tailor the behavior to be more applicable to you. For example, you may choose to increase physical activity by walking more, doing yoga, or training for a marathon. If you wish to modify another health behavior not on the list, please discuss it with me. If you have a current mental or physical condition that could be affected by this behavior, please consult your health care provider PRIOR to changing the behavior.
2. Review the research literature about your chosen health behavior. Why would you want to modify the behavior? What are the benefits to your health? What are the risks? Are there any gaps or controversies in the literature? Read at least 3 high-quality studies. These may be either empirical studies or review papers from peer-reviewed journals. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 (and others) of your text may be a useful starting point and might provide you with a few sources to get you started (depending on your topic).
3. Based on your reading of the literature, determine how you will measure your health behavior of choice and create a coding system to collect data. You will have to decide (i.e. operationally define) what constitutes the behavior. One option is to simply measure the frequency of the behavior. This may be as simple as recording the number of times a given behavior does or does not happen (e.g. # of cigarettes smoked) over a certain period of time. You will need to define the behavior precisely. Does taking a single puff of a cigarette count? Other health behaviors may involve more complex measurement methods. This will require searching the literature to learn about how it has been measured in other studies, and possibly coming up with your own original way of measuring it. Regardless, the way your behavior and/or outcome are measured should be given careful thought BEFORE data collection is begun. All variables must be quantifiable.
