HAPA model

Health education often does not show the desired success. Many risky behaviours seem to be very resistent to change, and educational interventions are often not widely accepted (e. g. smoking cessation, healthy diet).

Therefore it is important to analyze the cognitive processes that lie between the message of health promotion and health relevant behaviour. The model described below may contribute to answering the question how to proceed from the educational intervention to the desired health-literate behaviour, and in which crucial points of this process failure may be possible.
There are a number of models which try to explain the origin of human health behaviour and the possibilities to influence this attitude. There is a model integrating the elements of many other models: the HAPA model, developed at the end of the 1980s by Ralf Schwarzer in Berlin. It continues the concept of Antonovsky’s salutogensis model. The HAPA model describes various phases which an individual must pass completely in a positive sense to be able to adopt and maintain the desired behaviour (by abandoning harmful behaviour or by adopting health-conducive behaviour).

Please see the phases in the image below. A more detailed description of this model can be found on the following website: http://www.hapa-model.de/

As the self-efficacy expectancies are considered to play an essential role for adoption and maintenance of a health-relevant behaviour, the conditions under which this desired behaviour can be initiated and influenced by teachers or other multipliers are outlined in this overview.
Perceptions of self-efficacy are constructed in the course of life from four different sources: (1) information resulting from own successful actions, (2) experiences resulting from social comparison with others, (3.) convincing verbal feedback by important others and (4.) physiological and affective conditions.