Modeling Of Conceptions Of Health: A New Tool In Health Education

BACKGROUND: Conceptions allow individuals to interpret reality and to act on it according to their own form of coherence and validity. If a student’s conception of health is not organized at the beginning of the course so as to accept that the three domains of the biopsychosocial concept act on an equal footing, it is possible that notions brought by the instructors, relating to a domain that the student considers less operational, are too far removed from his proximal zone of development. This article proposes to shed light on this issue through an analysis, leading to a modeling of students’ conception of health at the beginning their osteopathy studies.METHODS: A semi-directed questionnaire survey was conducted among osteopathy students during their first week of training. The contents of the verbatims were analyzed according to their blocks of meaning, categorized to bring out the different conceptions of health and then modeled using network visualization software to illustrate the links and the relative weight of the different items of conceptions.RESULTS: We identified 36 categories of conceptions of health. The modeling shows strong links between the psychological and biological domains, while the social domain is isolated.CONCLUSIONS: From an andragogical perspective, modeling conceptions of health can allow students to situate their life course in relation to health and instructors, in order to identify the components of health conceptions that they do not yet mobilize.