Changing health practices: the experience from a worksite health promotion project

This paper uses data from an employee health promotion project for government employees to examine initial health practices and their relationship to social and demographic variables. It then uses data collected one year later to examine changes in health behaviors and to try to explain what types of people are most likely to undertake health behavior changes in a year, within the context of a worksite health promotion project. Most people in this sample of employees do make positive changes in health habits in at least one of the following areas: smoking, seatbelt usage, diet, exercise, alcohol usage. While a variety of different social and demographic variables are important in explaining initial differences in health practices, these same variables along with measures of personal efficacy and job stress are poor predictors of whether people change their health behavior over a year. Future research might usefully focus on more detailed collection of qualitative data to help understand what factors motivate people to change health behavior. Future survey approaches may then incorporate broader and more diverse categories of explanatory variables into regression models.