The Study On The Features Of College Students’ Values Toward Health, Self-efficacy And Healthy Behavior And Their Relations

Health is an eternal issue for human beings, it is the most valuable wealth in people’s lives, just as a saying goes "Body-health is basic to innovations". With people’life level increasing day by day, people’s cognition on health is increasingly profound, too, which is particularly true in the current days when the social economy is developing rapidly. However, in order to adjust to the fast-paced life and being under the great pressure from living, more often than not people have to achieve their goals at the expense of their health. Thus, the importance of health is becoming increasingly obvious. As is known to all that college students are the potential force of society, and they will push society forward to a certain degree. Therefore, the issue of college students’health is widely focused by the society.Most of the past studies on healthy behavior are combined with mental health, but individual’s values toward health as well as the realization of his or her self-efficacy are also two of the significant factors that exert deep effects on healthy behavior. Thus, this study is based on the establishment of the questionnaire of college students’values toward health, brings in self-efficacy as a mediating variable, and then explores the features of college students’values toward health, their self-efficacy and their healthy behavior, and the relations among these three variables. This study consists of two parts:Part one:The establishment of the questionnaire of college students’values toward health. We originally confirmed the theoretical dimensions of college students’values toward health and then drew up the draft of the needed questionnaire through analyses of the related references, opening questionnaire survey and the suggestions from psychology experts. After item analysis and twice factor analyses on 294 valid questionnaire, it formed the final questionnaire consisting of 19 items and 3 factors, namely, physical health values which reflects the extent to which individual focuses in physical condition, body shape and spiritual outlook, etc; mental health values which reflects the extent to which individual focuses in his or her inner condition, such as the intelligence, cognition, will and so on; the health values toward social behavior which shows the extent to which individual focuses in his or her ability to adapt to the surroundings, behavior, interpersonal communication skills. Then, we used this newly-made questionnaire to survey 1200 college students from five universities locating in southwestern and eastern China, and we gained 858 valid questionnaires which, then, were analyzed statistically. The results show that:the questionnaire we made is with good reliability and acceptable validity, the Chronbach a value of each dimension and the whole questionnaire is from 0.880 to 0.947. Moreover, in order to check the retest reliability of the questionnaire we chose a class to retest the questionnaire half a month later, the retest reliability value was good from 0.792 to 0.927. Finally, the confirmatory factor analysis also shows that each of those index meets the demand of statistical surveying.Part two:the exploration of the features of college students’values toward health, self-efficacy and healthy behavior, and the relations among these three variables. From the data analyzed statistically, we found that:currently, physical health is what college students care the most, and they do best in personal living habits; the differences of college students’ values toward health among grade and major are statistically significant, but those among genders, native places and parenthood are not; the differences of both of college students’self-efficacy and healthy behavior among genders, native place, parenthood, grade and major are statistically significant; the variables of college students’ values toward health, self-efficacy and healthy behavior are significantly positively correlated; the values toward health and self-efficacy are two of the positive predictors of healthy behavior; self-efficacy partly mediates the values toward health and healthy behavior which confirms the former theoretical hypotheses.