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The Diabetes Educator

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Health Education & Behavior
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Goal Setting as a Strategy for Health Behavior Change

Victor J. Strecher

Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, Rosenau Hall, CB 7400, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7400

Gerard H. Seijts

Gerjo J. Kok

Gary P. Latham

Russell Glasgow

Brenda DeVellis

Ree M. Meertens

David W. Bulger

This article discusses the beneficial effects of setting goals in health behavior change and maintenance interventions. Goal setting theory predicts that, under certain conditions, setting specific difficult goals leads to higher performance when compared with no goals or vague, nonquantitative goals, such as "do your best." In contrast to the graduated, easy goals often set in health behavior change programs, goal setting theory asserts a positive linear relationship between degree of goal difficulty and level of performance. Research on goal setting has typically been conducted in organizational and laboratory settings. Although goal setting procedures are used in many health behavior change programs, they rarely have been the focus of systematic research. Therefore, many research questions still need to be answered regarding goal setting in the context of health behavior change. Finally, initial recommendations for the successful integration of goal setting theory in health behavior change programs are offered.

Health Education & Behavior, Vol. 22, No. 2, 190-200 (1995)
DOI: 10.1177/109019819502200207
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?