The theory of planned behavior and the factors influencing human milk donation

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to verify to what extent the theory of planned behavior (TPB) can be used to identify the factors influencing the behavior towards human milk donation (HMD). Structural equation modeling was used to verify the following hypotheses: H1 - there is a relationship between behavioral beliefs and intention to perform HMD; H2 - there is a relationship between injunctive normative beliefs and the intention to perform HMD; H3 - there is a relationship between descriptive normative beliefs and the intention to perform HMD; H4 - there is a relationship between control beliefs and the intention to perform HMD. Logistic regression was used to verify hypothesis H5 - there is a relationship between intention and HMD. The key findings were as follows: behavioral beliefs and normative injunctive beliefs do not influence intention, so, H1 and H3 were rejected; normative injunctive beliefs and control beliefs influence intention, thus, H2 and H4 were accepted; and intention has very little influence on behavior, and as a consequence, H5 was rejected. Approximately 50% of intent (R2 = 0.512) can be explained by the three TPB predictor constructs, considered as a moderate predictive power; and intention is not relevant for predicting behavior. These findings contradict the TPB assumption that intention is the closest predictor of behavior when it comes to volitional behaviors. As a consequence, TPB may not be recommended to identify the factors influencing the donation of human milk, since intention was not relevant to predict such behavior.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.