Psychological Factors Influencing Physical Health in African American College Students

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the contributions of stress, health beliefs, health behaviors, and gender on physical health outcomes of African American college students. Measures of physical symptoms experienced and perception of health were used as indicators of physical health. The paper presents a model of the relationships among psychological and physical health variables and discusses support (and lack of support) for aspects of the model. Subjects were 59 African American students attending two universities in the Eastern region of the United States. A questionnaire that assessed health beliefs, health behaviors, stress, physical symptoms, and perception of health was administered to each subject. The results of regression analyses indicated that health beliefs and stress explained a significant amount of the variance of physical symptoms and that health behaviors explained a significant amount of the variance in perception of health. Physical symptoms and perception of health were not related to each other suggesting that these are independent concepts.