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Biomedical subjects

M J Kingry

Publications and source records attributed to M J Kingry.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Patient attitudes concerning health behaviors during pregnancy: initial development of a questionnaire.

The major determinant of infant mortality in the United States is low birthweight (LBW). Health behaviors related to LBW are inadequate prenatal care, poor nutrition, smoking, and moderate to heavy alcohol use. Before interventions can be designed to assist women in modifying these health behaviors, more must be understood about their causes. The Health Belief Model (HBM) is a framework for analyzing beliefs that motivate health behaviors and is well established as a model for understanding health behavior decisions. The chief aim of this study was to develop an instrument to assess women's health beliefs during pregnancy. Questions for the instrument were generated around the four major constructs of the HBM: perceived susceptibility, seriousness, benefits, and barriers. Four focus group interviews, a literature review, and consultation with an HBM expert provided content for questions. The questionnaire was administered to a convenience sample of 127 women. The measurement models were tested using confirmatory factor analysis. Parsimony was achieved by reducing the original 106-item scale to 64 items. The final instrument provides support for the HBM but not for all of its discrete constructs.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Primacy effects in clinical judgments of contingency.

In contingency judgment a primacy effect exists when a conclusion about the relationship between clinical variables is inordinately influenced by cases seen earlier rather than later in a presentation sequence. In this study, medical and nursing trainees evidenced this behavior in a hypothetical clinical judgment situation. The behavior was tied to an attention decrement explanation, by which inattention to the later-presented cases leads to inaccurate recall of the relative frequencies of observed cases, which in turn induces a misjudgment of a disease-finding contingency. An explicit intervention based on this hypothesis, forcing attention to later cases by warning that recall of the case frequencies would be required, was effective in reducing primacy effects among medical students. A related, but less explicit, intervention was also tried. This intervention did not significantly reduce primacy effects among nursing students, but was somewhat effective among general undergraduate students performing a non-clinical contingency judgment task.

Decision Support Techniques↗