A Factor-Structure Analytic Study of the Adolescents' Health Behaviors

Author: Kuo-chang Wang(Department of Health Education, National Taiwan Normal University)

Abstract：

Health behaviors play a very important role on the continuum of health-disease, and they are closely related with the development of health education programs and the promotion of health activities. Adolescents' health behaviors are the basis of the adult health behaviors, so by understanding adolescents' health behaviors, we can learn ado-lescents' health problems, as well as the obstacles to adult health behaviors.
The 2,516 seventh-grade students were randomly sampled from 696 junior high schools in Taiwan through a two-stage stratified cluster random sampling with probabili-ties proportional to sizes (pps). The data were collected via the self-reported question-naire of the students' health behaviors. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analy-ses were used to answer four research questions.
Among this study, adolescents' health behaviors are composed mainly of six mutu-ally related factors, that is to say, avoidance of addictive behaviors, avoidance of physio-logical, psychological, and environmental risk, health practices, traffic safety practices, preventive health care, avoidance of disease and injury risk.

Keywords：adolescents' health behaviors, multidimensional latent structure, avoidance of ad-dictive behaviors, avoidance of physiological, psychological, and environmental risk, health practices, traffic safety practices, preventive health care, avoidance of disease and injury risk

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