ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the research pertaining to health behavior and lifestyles. It describes the relationship between health lifestyles and social class. The chapter examines that health lifestyles generally take place outside of the formal health care delivery system, as people pursue their everyday lives in their usual social environment. However, an important facet of health behavior includes contact by healthy people with physicians and other health personnel for preventive care. Preventive care refers to routine physical examinations, immunizations, prenatal care, dental checkups, screening for heart disease, cancer, and other potential afflictions, and other services intended to ensure good health and prevent disease. Health lifestyles are collective patterns of health-related behavior based on choices from options available to people according to their life chances. Moreover, people in higher social classes have experienced greater life chances and acquired a stronger sense of control over life situations than individuals in the classes below them.
