Examining self‐affirmation as a tactic for recruiting inactive women into exercise interventions

Abstract

Recruitment of insufficiently active individuals into exercise interventions is difficult due to many different barriers, including motivational barriers and negative body image. The present study provided an initial conceptual test of whether self-affirmation can help increase recruitment of insufficiently active women to an exercise intervention. Emerging adult women were randomly assigned to complete a self-affirmation or control task prior to reading the same message concerning the consequences of inactivity. In addition to completing demographic and body image measures at baseline, U.S. undergraduate participants (N = 254) indicated their interest in registering for an intervention and their intention to exercise after the experimental manipulation. Data did not support hypotheses that (1) self-affirmed women would find the message less threatening and less manipulative, (2) self-affirmed women would have higher intentions to exercise,(3) self-affirmed women would be more likely to register interest for a future exercise intervention, and (4) condition and body dissatisfaction would interact such that the intervention would be particularly beneficial for women with high body dissatisfaction. Results revealed that 70% of participants were unwilling to

Effectiveness of Self-Affirmation Interventions in Educational Settings: A Meta-Analysis

“…It is important to note that the literature recognizes predictable patterns that can explain the achievement of heterogeneous effects, such as temporal conditions of implementation, methodological procedures, social and cultural characteristics of the context, and individual differences of the subjects [32]. The findings of studies carried out in the last five years whose results show inconsistent, minimal, or even null effects of selfaffirmation interventions present common explanatory assumptions related to individual differences between participants (coping with identity threat), the social and cultural context in which they operate, and differences in methodological procedures the between studies based on the provision of sufficient and necessary conditions for optimal fieldwork, taking as a reference the study by Cohen et al [17], where the characteristics of the sample in terms of age of participants and size and degree of heterogeneity are usually critical points of disagreement between studies, in line with the results of the present meta-analysis [46,47,54,112,119,120,124,125,128,130].…”