Health Psychology Exam 1

Introduction

  1. What is health? Health is a combination of many factors and aspect that lead a person to wellbeing. Health is a state of wellbeing. 

  2. What is the biomedical model?  How does it explain health?  What are its characteristics? The biomedical model states that all illness can be explained by an abnormal somatic process. A physical reasoning as to why an illness or injury is occurring. 

    1. Mechanistic -focuses on specific parts, sometimes doctors miss its connection to other body parts 

    2. Dualistic- views psychological health separately from physical health, separates the mind and the body but that isn’t true because they affect each other

  3. What is the biopsychosocial model?  How does it explain health? It shows that health is influenced by biological, psychological and social factors. It explains health in a more holistic matter. 

  4. How have the major health problems in the U.S. changed since the beginning of the 20th century? There were no cures to many diseases and illnesses at the start of the 20th century but now there are. Less people are dying and more people are living longer so now instead of focusing on infectious disease people are more worried about chronic illness because that is more of a current day issue. There is now more of a focus on psychological issues rather than infectious disease as well. 

  5. How significant is the role of health behaviors (e.g., tobacco use, poor diet/physical inactivity) in current major health problems in the U.S.? Poor health behaviors explain half of the deaths in the US. Tobacco and poor diet account for almost 33% of all deaths in the Untied States. 


Research Methods

  1. What are operational definitions? 

  2. What are the survey, case study, observational, and archival methods?  

    1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each (e.g., response bias)?

  • survey method- asking people about their thoughts, feelings and behaviors. It is easy to use and efficient but it can ask leading questions, lead to response bias and social desirability and recall bias 

  • case study- a case study is one person or group of people and it is a more niche study. It is more in depth and you can get unique information from this but you cannot generalize this to another population and you also cannot infer causation 

  • observational- you are not manipulating the data and you are just comparing and contrasting one group of people compared to another. It has high external validity but sometimes if participants know they are being watched they exhibit the Hawthorne effect which shows that they change their behaviors to portray themselves better and the researchers also could have bias 

  • archival methods- this is when you use existing data sources and data that has already been gathered to be to a conclusion. You do not have to collect data but you also will not be able to gather additional information if needed for your study.