Jej. Gallacher et al., ATTITUDES AND ISCHEMIC-HEART-DISEASE IN THE CAERPHILLY STUDY - THE HEALTH ATTITUDE INVENTORY, International journal of epidemiology, 24(2), 1995, pp. 321-330
Background. The Health Attitude Inventory (HAI) is developed to assess
attitudes, beliefs and values towards coronary-related behaviour in e
pidemiological studies. It comprises a 76-item self-administered quest
ionnaire which can be completed in under 10 minutes by most adults. Me
thods The HAI was administered to 2100 men aged 50-64 years along with
measures of ischaemic heart disease risk factors, including the follo
wing coronary-related behaviours: smoking, exercise, type A behaviour
and the consumption of fried food, dairy produce, wholemeal bread and
vegetables, Results. Cross-sectional analyses using linear regression
showed attitudes, beliefs and Values to explain between 8% and 27% of
the variance in the dietary coronary-related behaviour. For exercise 1
3% of the variance was explained, and for type A behaviour 18%. Simila
r analysis for smoking using logistic regression (non-smoker versus cu
rrent smoker) showed a predictive concordance of 95%. Conclusions. The
HAI has demonstrated the assessment of attitudes, beliefs and values
in an epidemiological setting to show associations with a range of cor
onary risk behaviours. This finding has potential public health as wel
l as aetiological application in that influential attitudes, values an
d beliefs can be identified to aid increasing healthy as well as reduc
ing risky coronary-related behaviour.