Scale library · Consumer behavior
Health Consciousness Scale: Gould (1990)
The Health Consciousness Scale (HCS) was developed by Gould (1990) to measure how far people attend to, think about and monitor their own health. It has 9 items measuring a single construct and was revalidated by Remr (2023) with 1,321 Czech respondents, confirming a unidimensional structure. Health consciousness often appears as an antecedent in theses on buying organic food, supplements and low-sugar drinks or using health-tracking apps, frequently combined with TPB.
Cite the original, not the blog.
- Model or scale: HCS
- Constructs: 1
- Items: 9
Original English items
Items marked (R) are reverse-coded: recode them before computing reliability or scale scores. Replace bracketed placeholders such as [system] with the name of the system, brand or organization you study.
Health Consciousness (HC, 9 items)
| Code | Item wording | Reverse-coded |
|---|---|---|
| HC1 | I reflect about my health a lot. | No |
| HC2 | I am very self-conscious about my health. | No |
| HC3 | I am generally attentive to my inner feeling about my health. | No |
| HC4 | I am constantly examining my health. | No |
| HC5 | I am alert to changes in my health. | No |
| HC6 | I am usually aware of my health. | No |
| HC7 | I am aware of the state of my health as I go through the day. | No |
| HC8 | I notice how I feel physically as I go through the day. | No |
| HC9 | I am very involved with my health. | No |
Response scale
5-point self-description scale: 1 = Does not describe me at all … 5 = Describes me completely, as described by Remr (2023), who states the response options were taken from the original scale. There are no reverse-coded items; the total ranges from 9 to 45, with higher scores meaning greater health consciousness. Many consumer behavior studies switch to a 5- or 7-point agreement scale; if you do, say so.
Licence and permission
The items are published in Gould's (1990) academic article and reproduced in Remr's (2023) open-access CC BY 4.0 article. Cite the original article; we found no restrictions on academic research use.
Sources (APA 7)
- Gould, S. J. (1990). Health consciousness and health behavior: The application of a new health consciousness scale. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 6(4), 228–237. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(18)31009-2
- Remr, J. (2023). Validation of the Health Consciousness Scale among the Czech population. Healthcare, 11(11), 1628. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11111628
Vietnamese translation
A Vietnamese translation of every item, with sample-size advice and studies that used the scale, is on the Vietnamese page for this scale.