Health salience: reclaiming a concept from the lost and found

This paper describes development of a new measure to assess one dimension of health motivation, the salience of health concerns. The new, five-item, measure was administered to 578 women as part of a larger investigation examining the determinants of exercise and calcium consumption. The study used a cross-sectional survey research design. Data were analyzed separately for premenopausal and menopausal women, allowing us to cross-validate our findings in two independent samples. Our findings suggest that the new measure has many desirable psychometric properties. It is internally consistent (Cronbach's alpha = 0.85 and 0.86 for premenopausal and menopausal women, respectively). For both samples, factor analysis revealed that over 60% of the total item variance was explained by a single underlying factor. All factor loadings exceeded 0.74. The measure also correlated in predictable ways with measures of other health beliefs, differentiated among women in different stages of change with respect to exercise and calcium consumption, and discriminated between women on the basis of their information-seeking behavior. We discuss the potential applications of this new measure in future research. Hopefully, the measure will facilitate research on the role that health salience plays in the behavior change process.