An Interview with Health Action Process Approach: a Magic Bullet?

FFS: Theories and models play an important role in the advancement of a science of behaviour change. There has been a growing consensus in recent years that behavioural intentions are not sufficient to explain behaviour and post-intentional processes such as planning need to be incorporated in order to explain how people change their behaviour (e.g., Abraham, Sheeran, & Johnston, 1998; Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). Yet, dominant models in the field such as the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1991) and the Transtheoretical Model (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1992) do not incorporate this evidence. Your Health Action Process Approach (HAPA; Schwarzer, 1992) explicitly includes post-intentional factors suggesting a distinction between pre-intentional motivation processes resulting in intention formation and post-intentional volition processes that lead to the actual health behaviour. Why is the HAPA not the leading model of behaviour in Health Psychology?