The Wellness Behaviors Inventory (WBI) is a 12-item measure that assesses how often common health-promoting behaviors (e.g., healthy eating, exercising) are performed. Vickers, Conway, and Hervig (1990) propose that health behaviours form replicable dimensions that can be classified into two broad domains – preventive health behaviours and risk taking behaviours.
Preventive health behaviours include those that should help prevent the risk of illness onset, and those that could improve health as well. Excluding behaviours related to medical and dental check-ups, the items in the WBI were designed to capture the frequency of this subset of preventive health behaviours.
Previous studies indicate that scores on the WBI negatively correlate with perceived stress and negative affect, and positively correlate with other preventive health behaviors, heath behavior intentions, positive affect, future time orientation, physical health, and perceived control over health (Dunne et al., 2018; Sirois, 2007, 2015b, 2015c; Sirois, Melia-Gordon, & Pychyl, 2003).
The WBI is also associated with personality traits. In a sample of students, the WBI was positively associated with the Big Five traits Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, and negatively related to Neuroticism at two separate time points (Sirois & Hirsch, 2015). The WBI is also negatively associated with perfectionistic concerns (Sirois, 2015b), and trait procrastination (Sirois, 2015a). A meta-analysis also found that the WBI was positively correlated with self-compassion across 14 different data sets, with Cronbach alphas ranging from .64 to .73 (Sirois, Kitner, & Hirsch, 2015), and was found to positively relate to self-compassion in a community sample of adults (Dunne et al., 2018).
There are two English versions of the WBI – one for administration with UK samples and one for administration with North American samples. The differences are due to culture specific terms for some of the health behaviours. The WBI is also available in French (Canadian), German, and Chinese. However, the psychosomatic properties of the translated versions are yet to be fully established.
Please note that we are in the process of writing up a manuscript for possible publication on the psychometric properties of the WBI. This paper is expected to be published sometime in late 2023 and will include population norms for the WBI across over 60 student, adult, and chronic illness samples, along with validity data with markers of health such as BMI, stress, and other health-related behaviours.
Until that time, please cite the WBI as follows:
Sirois, F. M. (2001; 2023). The Wellness Behaviors Inventory. Unpublished manual. Department of Psychology, Durham University, UK.
You can access the WBI by following this link.
Please note this will lead you to a brief survey that will invite you to share your reasons for using the WBI before linking you to a manual with the items, scoring, information about it’s scoring and SPSS syntax to do so.
References
Dunne, S., Sheffield, D., & Chilcot, J. (2018). Brief report: Self-compassion, physical health and the mediating role of health-promoting behaviours. Journal of Health Psychology, 7, 993–999.
Sirois, F. M. (2007). ‘‘I’ll look after my health, later’’: A replication and extension of the procrastination–health model with community-dwelling adults. Personality and Individual Differences, 43, 15-26.
Sirois, F. M. (2015a). Is procrastination a vulnerability factor for hypertension and cardiovascular disease? Testing an extension of the procrastination-health model Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 38, 578-589.
Sirois, F. M. (2015b). Perfectionism and health behaviors: A self-regulation resource perspective. In F. M. Sirois & D. S. Molnar (Eds.), Perfectionism, Health and Well-being (pp. 45-68). Switzerland: Springer.
Sirois, F. M. (2015c). A self-regulation resource model of self-compassion and health behavior intentions in emerging adults. Preventive Medicine Reports, 2, 218-222.
Sirois, F. M., & Hirsch, J. K. (2015). Big Five traits, affect balance and health behaviors: A self-regulation resource perspective. Personality and Individual Differences, 87, 59-64.
Sirois, F. M., Kitner, R., & Hirsch, J. K. (2015). Self-compassion, affect, and health behaviors. Health Psychology, 34, 661-669.
Sirois, F. M., Melia-Gordon, M. L., & Pychyl, T. A. (2003). “I’ll look after my health, later”: An investigation of procrastination and health. Personality and Individual Differences, 35(5), 1167-1184.
Vickers, R. R., Conway, T. L., & Hervig, L. K. (1990). Demonstration of replicable dimensions of health behaviors. Preventive Medicine, 19, 377-401.
Fuschia Sirois 