Predicting Exercise and Health Behavioral Intentions: Attitudes, Subjective Norms, and Other Behavioral Determinants¹

Abstract

By comparing exercise and health domains, the current experiment extends recent findings that within‐participant analyses of attitudes and subjective norms predict behavioral intentions well (Finlay, Trafimow, & Moroi, 1999). Within‐participant analyses show that health behaviors are particularly likely to be influenced by subjective norms, and those that are relatively normatively influenced are intended to be performed more than those that are not. However, neither was true of exercise behaviors. Additionally, other potential predictors for exercise (e.g., indirect attitudinal measures and goal‐oriented attitudes and intentions) correlated more strongly with exercise behavioral intentions than did general health attitudes and intentions.

How Do People Form Behavioral Intentions when Others Have the Power to Determine Social Consequences?

“…It is also possible to establish predictive validity and construct validity by investigating the pattern of correlations involving these and other items. Multiple assessments support the reliability and validity of these single item scales (Finlay, Trafimow, & Jones, 1997;Finlay, Trafimow, & Moroi, 1999;Finlay, Trafimow, & Villarreal, 2002;Trafimow & Finlay, 1996.…”

“…They obtained substantial individual differences in the extent to which different people's behaviors were more controlled by attitudes or subjective norms. And Finlay and her colleagues (Finlay, Trafimow, & Jones, 1997;Finlay, Trafimow, & Moroi;Finlay, Trafimow, & Villarreal, 2002) extended this research to the health domain; the distinction between attitudes and subjective norms applies very well to health behaviors.…”

Priming effects of perceived norms on behavioral intention through observability

“…In the health domain, injunctive norms appear to play a particularly important role with regard to intention to perform healthful behaviors (Finlay, Traffimow, & Villareal, 2002). Terry and Hogg (1996) proposed that injunctive norms may be especially important in predicting health-related behaviors because, for these types of behaviors, people tend to be confident of what they believe their most important others think, which may not be as true of other types of behaviors.…”

Theory Guiding Communication Campaign Praxis: A Qualitative Elicitation Study Comparing Exercise Beliefs of Overweight and Healthy Weight College Students

“…In general, the model is successful in predicting intention to exercise and actual behavior (Downs & Hausenblaus, 2003a;Finlay, Trafimow, & Villarreal, 2002;Godkin & Kok, 1996;. Although the subjective norm tends to have a low correlation with intention to exercise (e.g., Courneya & McAuley, 1995a, 1995b, Courneya, Plotnikoff, Hotz, & Birkett, 2000, attitude has been found to have a high correlation with exercise intention (Godkin & Kok, 1996); and perceived behavioral control has been shown to directly modify intention, as well as exercise behavior (Godkin & Kok, 1996).…”