Printed in Great Britain The health locus of control: an empirical test

This paper examines empirically the three dimensions of belief about the health locus of control, first by focusing on the sociodemographic characteristics asso-ciated with the three dimensions and, second, exam-ining the relationships between these dimensions and cigarette smoking, alcohol use and level of physical exercise. Subjective feelings about health were the major influence on each of the three dimensions, although the powerful other dimension varied most with the social and demographic factors. The relationship between belief and behaviour was only of modest strength, with the level of physical exercise being the only behaviour consistently associated with the dimen-sions of the health locus of control. The implications of these findings for health education programmes are discussed