Beliefs Underlying Eating Better and Moving More Lessons Learned from Comparative Salient Belief Elicitations with Adults and Youths

The reasoned action approach has been used to identify the determinants of a behavior to be modified by social and behavioral interventions. Information on the specific beliefs underlying behavioral decisions is vital to intervention design. More attention is needed on the salient belief elicitation—a critical step in a theory-based formative research process. This article considers the methodological issues involved in conducting a salient belief elicitation with special attention to an elicitation that allows the comparison of results across several behaviors and priority groups. The author uses the behaviors underlying overweight and obesity as her central example. To support the development of interventions to improve cardiovascular health and to explore methods for a comparative analysis of salient belief elicitations, semistructured interviews were conducted with 243 adults from two rural and two urban worksites in Indiana and 344 students from three middle schools in rural Indiana. Content and freq...