Investigating gender differences in health beliefs among rural population

Abstract

Hypertension is one of the non-communicable disease accounting for 10.8 percent of all deaths and 4.6 percent of all disability-adjusted life years in the country. There are several risk factors which contributes the hypertension. Health beliefs are important in preventing health risk behavior and give insight for individual to practice beneficial health behavior. By considering the increment of hypertension and utility of health beliefs, present study was undertaken to assess if there are any differences exists in health beliefs between males and females residing in rural areas. The present cross-sectional study conducted on a rural population of Mawana Tehsil in Meerut district of Uttar Pradesh, on individuals aged 18 years and above. A total of 263 participants were selected by multi-stage random sampling technique. The questionnaires for data collection comprised of a Demographic data sheet and Hypertension belief scale Robinson (2012). Descriptive statistics and one way Anova were used to analyze the findings. From the results it was observed that there was no significant difference found in the domain of perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived barriers and self-efficacy. There was a significant difference found between males and females in the domain cues to action (p