Indiana Consortium For Mental Health
Services Research
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

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Abstract

Reprint # 53: Rethinking Models of Health and Illness Behaviour

Models of health and illness behaviour are designed to answer a deceptively simple question: How do individuals come to recognize, understand and cope with health problems? Early research on this question was explicitly concerned with whether and why individuals turned to the new, 'scientific' forms of medical care instead of older, more indigenous methods and providers. By the 1950s, much of the research simply asked who used physicians, clinics and hospitals. In response to this question, models of 'health service use' evolved with few analyses of the use of any other sources of care outside the 'canopy' of formal, allopathic medicine (Pescosolido and Kronenfeld, 1995). Models of health service use have become the dominant approach to understanding illness behaviour and are used to understand not only the use of allopathic medicine but are often currently employed to describe the characteristics of individuals who turn to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).