I’m beginning to build a bank of resources to support people to use the measures of perceived control over mortality risk that Daniel Nettle and I developed some years ago (Pepper & Nettle, 2014). So far, these measures seem to be a good predictor of health behaviour and, in our data, they outperform the Multidemsional Health Locus of Control (MHLC), which is a commonly used measure examining a similar construct (Brown & Pepper, 2023).

To get things started, I’ve created my first ever #BetterPoster (see here for more on the “Better Poster” concept), giving a brief overview of the theory and evidence regarding the relationship between perceived uncontrollable mortality risk and health behaviour. I presented this poster at EHBEA2021, and Richard Brown gave a talk on some of the evidence summarised in panel 4 of the poster below. The 2-minute audio recording that accompanies the poster can be downloaded here.

I’ve also created a 1-page guide to using the measure, which gives the question text and an at-a-glance summary of what the responses represent, with references for further details. You can download the guide here.

The poster above is embedded as an image, so the links don’t work. Here are the links to the key references:

Nettle (2010),

Pepper & Nettle (2014a),

Pepper & Nettle (2014b),

Brown, Coventry & Pepper (2021)

The video

The wonderful Richard Brown has created a video, explaining the findings of our paper in the Journal of Public Health. Richard’s creation won him the best talk prize at the Northumbria University Early Career Researchers’ conference, 2021.