Preventive actions in dental disease, tuberculosis, and cancer.

IF ONLY a minor percentage of the public consistently takes advantage of available preventive health measures, questions might well be raised about the effectiveness of current efforts in health education. But if it is found that certain subgroups in the population consistently follow preventive health recommendations, then a systematic study of these subgroups in relation to persons that fail to take preventive action might reveal the factors that facilitate or inhibit preventive behavior. Firm data on the preventive behavior of the population should prove useful for planning and practice in preventive medicine. Unfortunately, the imposing list of studies of health behavior in the literature do nolt provide definitive knowledge about preventive behavior (1). The vast majority have focused on what might be termed "illness behavior"; that is, behavior following the appearance of visible symptoms. Neither has research revealed the extent to which persons relatively free of symptoms voluntarily undertake actions to prevent or detect possible disease. The few studies of preventive behavior (2-4) are of limited value since they were performed, for the most part, on relatively small samples or in highly restricted geographic regions. Moreover, most of the studies obtained measures at only one point in time, thus precluding the analysis of behavioral consistency over time. In addition, such studies usually dealt with responses to a single health condition, which eliminated the possibility of assessing the consistency of behavior across several health conditions.