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Asked by anon-228656 to Jolel, Emily, Amber, Alex on 10 Nov 2019.
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Amber Cronin answered on 10 Nov 2019:
It’s tricky because even though your instinct is to want to make someone choose healthier decisions, you also have to respect their right to make their own choices. You can’t force someone to do something they don’t want to, even if it would be better for them! You can express your concern, and tell them you are worried about the choices they are making, but at the end of the day if they want to change they are responsible for it, not you.
Instead, what you can do is offer help and be there for them if they ever do make the decision to change their habits.
Another thing that you can do to encourage someone to make healthier choices is to lead by example. For instance, if you have a friend that smokes, you are more likely to encourage them to reduce or quit smoking if you don’t smoke compared to if you joined in smoking with them!
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Alex Spiers answered on 11 Nov 2019:
As an epidemiologist, I find out people’s decisions through surveys. The information that we look at is always confidential. This is so people can be honest when answering the surveys. Young people will often share sensitive information, such as if they smoke, or do drugs. If we intervened in the surveys, people might not be honest with us – and would not help us with the research.
However we get involved with outreach to make sure yong people do make the right conditions through sharing information
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Emily Mattacola answered on 11 Nov 2019:
So one of the main focuses of health psychology is health behaviour change. You’re completely right; no one is totally healthy. Even as health psychologists, there are things that we do that we know aren’t good for our health, and that’s just a part of being human – no one is perfect! What we try to do though is to help people to make the best decisions that they can about their health. We do this by trying to understand what might be stopping them from making the healthier choice in the first place, and we tend to find that this can come under 3 different categories;
Capability – do you know how to do the behaviour? It’s all well and good telling someone that they need to eat more fruit and veg, but if you don’t know how to cook, then that’s going to make it even harder!
Opportunity – do you have the resources you need to do the behaviour? Thinking about our fruit and veg example, if you don’t have a lot of money, then buying fresh fruit and veg can seem really expensive. If you can’t afford to buy the fruit and veg, then you’re not going to eat them.
Motivation – do you actually want to do the behaviour? If you don’t like the taste of fruit and veg and the thought of eating them makes you feel sick, then you’re not going to want to change. Motivation is probably our biggest problem in changing people’s behaviour, because we don’t really understand how to change people’s minds about what they want to do very well. This is something we need to do lots of work on to understand better.
Once we understand someone’s capability, opportunity and motivation to change their behaviour, then we can help them to do that using a variety of methods that can be anything as simple as giving information, through to a long training programme (like an after school course).
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Jolel Miah answered on 11 Nov 2019:
I work with over 100 clients a week and I inform them I’m not here to educate you on what’s good or bad for you, most people know. I tell them how I can help them support changes in their behaviour if they are up for it. I think listening or rapport is really important and you don’t need to be a health freak to help someone. A lot of health professionals do things which are bad for their health for example drinking alcohol, smoke etc but they still can help people. Its important for them not to know too much about you as they working on them and not you.
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