Attributions for Health‐Related Physical Activity

Abstract

Tenets of Weiner's (1985, 1986) attribution theory were examined in the context of being active enough for health benefits, including associations between attributions, emotions, and future expectations. Participants completed questionnaires assessing activity, perceived success/failure to be active enough for health benefits, attributions, emotions, and future expectancy. Perception of being active enough for health benefits was associated with more internal, personally controllable, and stable attributions. Support was found for relationships between perceived outcome and emotions, but not for attributions and emotions. Finally, a positive relationship was found between stability of attributions and certainty of achieving similar future activity outcomes. Given the interest in promoting activity for health, examining attributions for being sufficiently active for health may be considered an important advance.

Attributions and self-efficacy for physical activity in multiple sclerosis

“…A similar protocol has been successfully used previously to assess perceived activity outcomes (Nickel & Spink, 2010b).…”

“…These include stability (belief that the cause is permanent vs. temporary), locus of causality (belief that the individual vs. the situation is responsible), and controllability (belief that the cause is controllable vs. uncontrollable). Weiner predicted that the stability of attributions would be the most important in determining future expectations (Weiner, 1986), and previous research concerning health-related physical activity has supported the role of stability in predicting certainty of similar future outcomes (Nickel & Spink, 2010b). Self-efficacy and future expectations are not synonymous, but they are related (Bandura, 1997).…”

A theoretical framework and research agenda for studying team attributions in sport

“…There is good support for a relationship between team attributions and self-esteem in team sport (Green & Holman, 2004;Sherman & Kim, 2005;Sherman, Kinias, Major, Kim, & Prenovost, 2007) and several experimental studies have demonstrated that a greater use of team-serving attributions causes subsequent increases in social self-esteem (Smurda et al, 2006). A related emotion, pride, has also been assessed in attribution research (Tracy & Robins, 2007;Nickel & Spink, 2010). Both pride and self-esteem should respond similarly to attributions, and controllability in particular has been hypothesised have an important effect on these feeling states (Goetz, Frenzel, Stoeger, & Hall, 2010).…”

Self-regulation and physical activity in WKU employees

“…Personal control refers to the ability of the person to control the primary cause (controllable or uncontrollable), while external control refers to the ability of others to control the primary cause (controllable or uncontrollable). The external control dimension has been excluded from previous research on attributions for PA and may not be useful here as these types of attributions cannot be self-regulated (Minifee & McAuley, 1998;Nickel & Spink, 2010). Therefore, the external control dimension was measured, but there are no hypothesized results for this dimension.…”

“…More internal, stable, and personally controllable attributions (e.g., long term effort) lead to higher frequency and higher perceived success of PA (Minifee & McAuley, 1998;Nickel & Spink, 2010). Individuals with a lower frequency of PA behavior and individuals who failed to adhere to an exercise program make less internal, more unstable, and more personally uncontrollable attributions (Minifee & McAuley, 1998).…”