Health beliefs interviews were conducted with 250 children aged 6-17 years. A factor analysis of the items resulted in six correlated factors which were interpreted as 1) specific health concerns, 2) general health concerns, 3) perceived parental concern, 4) perceived general susceptibility, 5) perceived susceptibility to specific conditions, and 6) perceived seriousness of and susceptibility t...

Social networking websites such as Twitter have invigorated a wide range of studies in recent years ranging from consumer opinions on products to tracking the spread of diseases. While sentiment analysis and opinion mining from tweets have been studied extensively, surveillance of beliefs, especially those related to public health, have received considerably less attention. In our previous work...

Using ethnographic techniques, I studied the religious and spiritual aspects of health care at the N.R.I. Academy of the Sciences in Chinakakani, Andhra Pradesh, India, to gain perspectives on how culture influences people’s beliefs about health. It became apparent that “cultural customs” accounted for people’s similar beliefs concerning recovery from disease and injury, irrespective of their d...

BACKGROUND Individual health beliefs are likely to play a key role in how people respond to knowledge and information about the potential harm from smoking and alcohol abuse. The objectives of the study were to 1) explore whether functional beliefs and risk minimizing beliefs were associated with intention to quit smoking and confidence to quit smoking and 2) explore whether functional beliefs ...

BACKGROUND Caregivers deal with oral health care of the dependent elderly; however, this has a low priority among them, and their education in daily oral care is deficient. Therefore, studying the oral care practices as well as their oral health beliefs is important as these affect the quality of the oral care they perform. OBJECTIVE To compare formal and informal caregivers' oral care practi...