THE EFFECT OF HEALTH BELIEF MODEL BASED ON EDUCATION INTERVENTION ON PHYSICAL ACTIVITY OF ELDERLY WOMEN

Physical inactivity is one of the most important reasons of chronic medical
diseases in the elderly. Regarding to the importance of modifying physical activity behavior in elderly
women and to produce proper educational and interventional strategies, this study was aimed to assess
the effect of Health Belief Model (HBM) based on education intervention on the physical activity among
elderly women.
Materials & Methods: Two hundred elderly women from Urmia City participated in this interventional
study. They were chosen using the multistage sampling method. SPSS 21, and Smart PLS 3.5 soft wares
were used for structural equation modeling and to test the hypotheses and the model's fitness.
Result: The results indicated that the education intervention had a positive effect on improving elderly
women knowledge and behavior for physical activity. Generally, physical activity knowledge had a
direct and increasing effect on the behavior through education intervention program, before intervention
(β =0.168, p=0.01) to three months (β =0.180, p=0.01) and six months after intervention (β =0.232,
p<0.0001).It also effected indirectly on their behavior by attitude’s constructs of the HBM. Furthermore,
the results showed that perceived susceptibility, perceived barrier, self-efficacy and knowledge had the
highest effect on the behavior. Hence, this model can predict the dependent variables related to behavior.
Conclusion: The results of the current study indicated that the HBM was a proper model for education
intervention for the elderly women. In addition, HBM based education program for physical activity
improved elderly women behavior