Objective: To determine which theoretical perspectives were most commonly used with adolescent health promotion research.
Design: Existing theoretical perspectives appropriate for use with adolescent health promotion research were reviewed. Instead of randomly selecting several theories for comparison, an intensive review of the literature was conducted to identify which theories were most commonly used with adolescent health promotion research. A PubMed and CINAHL search of journals that routinely publish adolescent health research was conducted.
Population: journals that publish adolescent health research (Applied Nursing Research, Issues in Comprehensive Pediatric Nursing, Journal of Adolescent Health, Journal of Nursing Scholarship, Nursing Research, Research in Nursing and Health, and Western Journal of Nursing Research). One hundred eighty-two published adolescent health promotion articles were identified in these journals from 1990-October, 2001 and were included in this review. Health promotion was defined as a process of helping individuals obtain optimal health (O’Donnell, 1987).
Findings: The results of this review revealed some interesting and noteworthy information regarding the state of theory use in adolescent health research for the last decade. For most journals, approximately half of the published articles referenced a theory in some respect. Seventy-five percent of published adolescent health research that referred to a theoretical perspective fully used that perspective to guide the study. Seventeen percent of theoretical perspectives or their authors were only mentioned in the published research and 13% of the articles focused specifically on testing a theory. There was some overlap among these categories and articles were counted in more than one category as appropriate. Twenty-nine percent of theoretical perspectives were used by more than one author and 12% of authors generated their own theoretical perspective from the literature or existing models. However, out of 45 different theoretical models, 73% of them were used only once.
The amount of published adolescent health promotion research that utilizes a theoretical perspective has increased over time during the past 10 years. In addition, the amount of qualitative research that focuses on the adolescent experience has also increased. Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986), The Health Belief Model (Becker, 1978), and The Health Promotion Model (Pender, 1996) emerged as the most frequently used theories for adolescent health promotion research.
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