Enabling factors

These are characteristics of the environment that facilitate the healthy behavior to occur and any skill or resource required to attain that behavior. Enabling factors are required for motivation to be realised. Examples of enabling factors include availability, accessibility and or affordability of health resources, conditions of living, social support, Government laws, (priority and commitment to health), and the presence of health-related skills. For example, enabling factors for a mother to give oral rehydration solution to her child with diarrhoea would be Time, container, salt, sugar, and skill on how to prepare and administer it. In general, it is believed that enabling factors should be available for an individual or community to perform intended behaviour.

a) Resources. For example, in a given health post the lack of availability of the family planning method of choice for a mother may discourage her from the utilisation of the service in the future.

b) Skills. For example, if a breast feeding mother is not well trained on positioning and attachment of her baby she may have difficulty in properly breastfeeding her child.

Application of Theory of Reasoned Action / Planned Behavior/ (Ajzen,1988)

A very important thing here is that a behavioral intention (willingness/ readiness to perform a certain behavior) of an individual should be known before requesting him to perform a certain behavior. That is to mean that the final behavior of an individual is the total of behavioral intentions and enabling factors.

Behavioral intention is also determined by the following three components: The attitude to a behavior (opinions of oneself about the behavior), the subjective norm on behavior (opinions of others about the behavior), and the perceived behavioral control over the behavior (self-efficacy towards the behavior). For example, we wanted an individual to perform a particular behavior provided that enabling factors (resources or skills) are available.