From Health Behavior to Care: Anthropological Perspectives on Care-Seeking and Caregiving

This conceptual narrative review examines what is gained and lost when care-seeking and caregiving are approached primarily through health behavior theories. Models such as the Health Belief Model, the Theory of Reasoned Action, the Theory of Planned Behavior, the Integrated Behavioral Model, Social Cognitive Theory, and Social Network Theory have made important contributions to the study of health behavior by clarifying how perceived risk, severity, benefits, barriers, intentions, norms, self-efficacy, and social relationships shape action. Yet, when these models organize the analysis of care-seeking without sustained attention to the wider relations and conditions under which care unfolds, or when their constructs are extended to caregiving, they may foreground the individual actor, discrete decision-making, and behavior change while leaving other dimensions of care less visible. Drawing on medical anthropology, critical medical anthropology, political economy, structural violence, and the anthropology of care, this paper argues for an expansion from health behavior to care. Care-seeking and caregiving are not simply individual behaviors but relational, moral, material, and temporally unfolding practices shaped by explanatory models, plural therapeutic systems, household obligations, gendered labor, poverty, chronicity, and institutional constraint. An anthropological care framework repositions behavioral theories by examining how care-seeking and caregiving unfold within interpretive, material, relational, and moral conditions shaped by wider structures. The proposed framework also offers a recursive account in which care actions can modify understanding, resources, relationships, and obligations, shaping what kind of care becomes possible next.