Adopting Self-Medication Prevention Behaviors According to Health Belief Model Constructs

Self-medication is one of the most important social, health, and economic challenges of many countries, especially Iran.

Therefore, this study aimed to predict the adoption of self-medication prevention behaviors according to Health Belief Model (HBM) constructs in the women attending health centers of Bandar Abbas, Hormozgan Province, Iran.

The participants of the present investigation were 180 women residing in Bandar Abbas in 2016. Convenient sampling method was applied to select the participants. Data were collected through a questionnaire containing questions on demographic information, as well as the HBM constructs. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS version 19 using Pearson’s correlation coefficient and logistic regression.

The mean age of the participants was 30.8 ± 8.6 years. Among the HBM constructs, it was found that there was a positive relationship between the perceived susceptibility and perceived severity that the relationship was 0.231 at the significant 2-tailed level of 0.01. While, there was a negative correlation between the perceived barriers and perceived benefits that the relationship was -0.231 at the significant 2-tailed level of 0.01. The results of multiple regression analysis represented that considering HBM constructs, only R2 = 0.048 of the self-medication preventive behaviors could be explained (R2 = 0.048, P = 0.042).

Regarding the results of this study, only four percent of Health Belief Model Constructs could predict the preventive behavior in self-medication. Based on the weak prediction of model constructs and the findings of this study, there is a need to focus on the benefits, perceived susceptibility, and perceived barriers in designing health promotion programs.