Effect of Perceived Barriers and Self-Efficacy on Daily Exercise among Employees using HBM

This study aimed to determine the relationship between the constructs of Health Belief Model (HBM) and doing daily exercise to prevent cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) among the employees of Ilam University of medical sciences in Iran.

About 294 employees of Ilam University of medical sciences participated in this cross-sectional study after providing a written consent form in 2017. The tool to collect data was an HBM-ISCS questionnaire, which was applied. Eventually, the obtained data were analyzed using SPSS 16 and logistic regression.

The results showed that 72.4% of participants did not exercise daily, and the Mean±SD of their daily exercise was 8.08±1.51min. Logistic regression showed that the possibility of daily exercise per unit of increase in perceived barriers decreased by about 10%, while every unit of increase in the self-efficacy score resulted in the possibility of 1.12 times more doing daily exercise. The possibility of doing daily exercise among men was 2 times more than in women, and among the personnel of financial/administrative department, it was about 2.5 times more than in the employees of health care department. Accordingly, the possibility of doing exercise decreased by about 8% per unit of increase in work experience.

The amount of doing daily exercise among the participants of this study was low, and implementing interventions commensurate with the results of this study and based on HBM can be effective in improving the amount of doing daily exercise in them.