Health related attitudes and health promoting behaviors: differences between health fair attenders and a community group.

Demographic, attitudinal, and behavioral differences between health fair attenders and a community comparison group were examined along with predictions of health promoting behaviors from demographic and attitudinal variables. Differences between questionnaire responses of 155 health fair attenders and 71 grocery shoppers indicated attenders perceived themselves having better current health and greater internal control of their health, and reported more behaviors indicating health responsibility, exercise, and nutrition than the comparison group. Psychological variables--particularly perceptions of greater self-efficacy and better health status--were the best predictors of attenders' health promoting behaviors; demographic variables were less important. On the other hand, demographic variables were most predictive of comparison group health promoting behaviors with psychological variables playing a lesser role. Further studies of relationships between the variables examined here and experimental studies of the effects of health fair attendance on health knowledge and performance of health promoting behaviors are needed. Assuming health fairs are effective in educating attenders, it was concluded that health fair planners should: 1) encourage nonattenders to become attenders and attenders to be repeat attenders, 2) carefully promote and advertise health fairs, and 3) hold health fairs in locations easily accessible to large numbers of people.