Salience | Number of affected relatives |
| Affected relative’s age at diagnosis or death |
| Severity of illness: premature death or disability |
| Acknowledging familial risk |
| Influence of gender, class, ethnic group |
| Living through relative’s illness experience |
| Shared environment with affected relative |
| Counting and discounting familial events |
| Comparing similarities and differences with affected relatives |
| Patterns within family history, eg, ages, gender, etc |
Personalizing process | Models of health and illness |
| Models of disease causation |
| Models of inheritance |
| Notions of bad luck and fatalism |
Personal sense of vulnerability | Behavior change, eg, lifestyle risk factors |
| Undergoing disease screening |
| Acceptability of disease as illness or mode of death |
| Continued anxiety |