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Old Clothes and an Older Look

The Case for a Radical Makeover in Health Behaviour Research

THE BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY, frances.mielewczyk{at}bps.org.uk

Carla Willig

CITY UNIVERSITY, C.Willig{at}city.ac.uk

Social cognition models (SCMs) have been described by Ingham as old clothes fit only for the jumble, yet their use in investigations of health behaviour performance in recent years has proliferated rather than declined. In a critique of the literature, this paper highlights a range of theoretical, methodological and performance-based limitations of the SCM approach and demonstrates that a ceiling has now been reached whereby more than half the variance in health behaviour performance is routinely unexplained, despite all efforts to improve the models. A major conceptual flaw within the SCM approach is identified and it is argued that `health behaviours', as generally defined, do not exist and that health-related activities only acquire meaning and significance on the basis of their relationship to the broader social prac- tices of which they form a part. A `new look' is proposed for research in this field which takes this alternative conceptualization into account.

Key Words: context • health behaviours • meaning • social cognition models

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