Demonstration of Replicable Dimensions of Health Behaviors

Abstract
Appropriate health behaviors are necessary to ensure health and well- being, thereby keeping military personnel ready to perform their jobs which may demand exceptional efforts at key times. An understanding of factors influencing health behaviors would be more readily achieved if general dimensions could be identified to delineate sets of health behaviors that consistently co-occur. Prior research has suffered from the use of only brief lists of health behaviors, failure to systematically select health behaviors to represent hypothesized health behavior dimensions, and failure to replicate findings across samples. The present study was designed to extend prior efforts by determining the number of dimensions of health behavior that could be reliably identified in two samples of Navy personnel. A set of 40 health behavior items was chosen to represent four major dimensions of health behavior that prior work suggested were present in groups representing a wide range of social and demographic backgrounds.

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