Patterns in preventive behaviour: a study of women in middle age.

There has been little comparative research to discover if the same people take part in different preventive health programmes. The study described here examines if the same women carry out seven different types of preventive health behaviour and attempts to identify ways of characterising participants or non-participants in the various forms of behaviour. The results show that the probability of women who carry out one type of preventive health behaviour carrying out another was low. However, the one factor that distinguished between participation and non-participation in various forms of preventive health behaviour was social class. The need to develop a model of health behaviour which accommodates both general structural factors and specific beliefs and circumstances is recommended.