Life Course Perspectives on the Onset and Continuity of Preventive Healthcare Behaviors

Preventive healthcare is considered a cornerstone of good health and well-being that can play a major role in reducing a country's healthcare costs and improving both the length and quality of people's lives. Previous research on preventive healthcare behaviors has been predominantly cross-sectional, ignoring the dynamic nature of people's health behaviors over a full life span. As a result, the reasons for the development, stability, and changes of individuals' preventive healthcare behaviors over time remain relatively unknown. Our article contends that to understand the degree of people's engagement in preventive healthcare behaviors, we must understand the origins, continuity, and discontinuity of such behaviors. We offer the life course paradigm as a viable framework for studying preventive healthcare behaviors at different stages in life. Based on theory and previous research, our article proposes that the onset, continuity, and changes in preventive healthcare behaviors are the outcomes of physical, social, and emotional demands triggered by life events that require adaptation through the mechanisms of socialization, stress and coping, and human development. These mechanisms are the underlying change processes of the three main life course theoretical perspectives-normative, stress, and human capital, respectively. Our paper discusses implications of adopting the life course approach for theory and practice, and offers a research agenda in the form of general propositions and conceptual directions for future research.