Community Participation in Health among the General Population in Kermanshah city: The Predictive Role of Personality Factors and Self-Effiacy

Background: Given that social psychologists focus on the interaction between social and psychological factors in the community participation process, particularly in health, the study was conducted to evaluate the community participation in health and determine the contribution of personality factors and individual on its. Materials and methods: In this descriptive study by using voluntary sampling method, 710 people from the general population of Kermanshah in 2015 were selected to participate in the study. The study instruments were included questionnaires of Community Participation in Health, General Self-Effiacy Beliefs (GSE-10), and NEO Five-Factor Personality Traits. The collected data was analyzed using analysis of variance, Pearson correlation, and regression analysis by software SPSS-21. Results: 482 (67.9%) people who returned questionnaires were male. The participants were aged between 30-75 years with mean (SD) of age 43.5 (8.2) years. In general, the results showed that the overall mean for community participation in health is 65.3% and 62.5% of the people are with poor participation, 34.1% of those are with moderate participation, and 3.4% of those are with high participation. Furthermore, the results showed that there is a signifiant relationship between all components of personality and self-effiacy with community participation in health (P<0.01). Conclusion: Given that community participation in health is poor in Kermanshah and government organizations programs in healthcare and the health of individuals and society also will not reach the desired goal in absence of public participation, it seems that planning is essential to improve the current situation with regard to the people’s personality traits and self-effiacy.