THE STAGE MODEL AND PROCESSES OF CHANGE IN DIETARY-FAT REDUCTION

This paper reports research showing that a modified version of Prochas ka & DiClemente's (1982) stage model of behaviour change can account f or dietary fat reduction in a sample of 133 young English adults. Proc haska Sr DiClemente's model posits five sequential stages through whic h people pass in the course of behaviour change. The current research developed a new, simplified staging questionnaire which successfully c ategorized respondents into groups whose dietary fat consumption diffe red as the model predicts-that is, those in later stages were consumin g less dietary fat than those in earlier stages. The research focused on four social and psychological processes which Prochaska & DiClement e argue operate most powerfully at the four different stage transition s. Results showed that two of the processes (consciousness raising and self-liberation) could, between them, distinguish all five stages fro m each other. The two processes had their decisive impact in the predi cted order (i.e. consciousness raising discriminating between earlier stages and self-liberation distinguishing between later stages] but th ey did not operate at the particular stage transitions reported in Pro chaska and his colleagues' own research. The other two processes (i.e. self re-evaluation and helping relationships) did not discriminate be tween people at different stages. This suggests that Prochaska & DiCle mente's findings cannot entirely be replicated in this domain.