The Health Belief Model (HBM) has played a key role in describing, explaining, and
predicting health-related outcomes. As one of the major health behavior theories,
HBM has been well applied in numerous health-related studies. However, these
studies often ignore the original conception of HBM as a theoretical model because
they focus mainly on the predictive roles of risk perception variables – i.e., perceived
susceptibility, severity, benefit, and barrier. Within that process, cues to action has not
been comprehensively studied. The current study addresses these limitations in HBM
research in two ways: (1) following the original conception of HBM and the
recommendation by previous researchers, we did not use risk perception constructs as
separate predictors but rather used perceived threat (perceived severity×perceived
susceptibility) and perceived evaluation of action (perceived benefit-barrier); (2) we
explored both internal and external cues in predicting health-related outcome and
separated out interpersonal and media cues from external cues. Path analysis of 992
representative Korean adult samples in the context of tuberculosis (TB) revealed three
major findings: (1) Interpersonal and (2) media cues are related to TB screening
intention directly and indirectly through perceived threat; (3) perceived threat, but not
perceived evaluation of action, is significantly related to TB screening intention.
Theoretical and practical implications for our findings are discussed.