The Handbook of Health Behavior Change, 5th Edition

The overarching goal of this book is to inform healthcare providers, policy makers, and researchers about the most current theories, challenges, and interventions for supporting health behavior change, including life-style behaviors and chronic disease management. The book is organized into six sections comprising twenty-five chapters. The first section focuses on theoretical models of health behavior change. Theoretical frameworks guide the development of strategies and interventions for behavior change and inform health behavior research and evaluation. Section two provides updated reviews of factors that serve as obstacles to or that facilitate lifestyle change and disease management behaviors. It considers individual characteristics and psychosocial factors, as well as family, community, and broader socio-cultural contexts. Section three focuses on lifestyle changes for the health behaviors with the most robust associations with health outcomes. These include dietary behaviors, physical activity, tobacco, alcohol, stress, and of course, the challenge of tackling multiple health risk behaviors. New to the Fifth Edition is a chapter on sun protection, which reviews risk factors and contributors to sun exposure/tanning, as well as individual and community-based strategies to promote sun protection behaviors and reduce skin cancer and melanoma. Section four addresses the challenges of engaging in disease management behaviors for chronic health conditions with lifelong medical regimens. The chapters focus on many of the most prevalent chronic illnesses that contribute to avoidable mortality, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory diseases (specifically asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), infectious diseases (including HIV, other sexually transmitted diseases, and tuberculosis), cancer, and obesity. Section five describes the interventions to support health behavior change across systems. Finally, the sixth section introduces the foundations of measuring health behaviors and provides an updated review of validated approaches to measuring common health behaviors, including eating, physical activity, medication adherence, and sleep.