Momentary assessment of physical activity intention-behavior coupling in adults

Abstract

Research attempting to elucidate physical activity (PA) intention-behavior relations has focused on differences in long-term behavior forecasting between people. However, regular PA requires a repeated performance on a daily or within-daily basis. An empirical case study application is presented using intensive longitudinal data from a study of PA in adults to (a) describe the extent to which shortterm intention-behavior coupling occurs and (b) explore time-varying predictors of intention formation and shortterm intention-behavior coupling. Adults (n = 116) participated in three 4-day waves of ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Each day, participants received EMA questionnaires assessing short-term PA intentions and wore accelerometers to assess whether they engaged in ≥10 min of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) in the 3-hour period after each EMA prompt. Concurrent affective states and contexts were also assessed through EMA. Participants reported having short-term intentions to engage in PA in 41% of EMA prompts. However, participants only engaged in ≥10 min of MVPA following 16% of the prompts that short-term PA intentions were reported indicating an intention-behavior gap of 84%. Odds of intentions followed by PA were greater on occasions when individuals reported higher levels of positive affect than was typical for them. This study is the first to take an EMA approach to describe short-term intentionbehavior coupling in adults. Results suggest that adults have difficulty translating intentions into behavior at the momentary level, more so than over longer timescales, and that positive affect may be a key to successfully translating intentions into behavior. Keywords Intention-behavior gap, Exercise, Planned behavior, MotivationIntentions to engage in physical activity (PA) are posited as a proximal determinant of behavior in many popular theories of motivation [1,2]. Yet, the predictive power of intentions to explain PA behavior is often limited in empirical studies [3,4]. Previous research has almost exclusively focused on identifying time-invariant predictors of why some people have stronger intentions than others (i.e., intention formation) or are better able to follow-though with their intentions than others (intention-behavioral coupling) [5,6]. Studies in this area often focus on long-term intentions such as intentions to engage in regular PA over time spans up to several months. As a result, it is unclear what time-varying factors predict intentions to be active and intention-behavior coupling over shorter time frames such as minutes and hours, which may be important for understanding why individuals fail to engage in PA that was intended just a few hours earlier. This article describes methods for using intensive longitudinal data (IDL) collected through ecological momentary assessment (EMA) as well as accelerometery to investigate short-term intentions to be active and intention-behavior coupling in adults.Even though individuals may form intentions to be active, evidence ...

Application of the Multi‐Process Action Control Framework to Understand Parental Support of Child and Youth Physical Activity, Sleep, and Screen Time Behaviours

“…This reasoning is based on the supposition that the benefits of PA (instrumental attitude) and one's basic PA skills (perceived capability) remain fairly constant, but feelings about performing the act (affective attitude) and the opportunity to perform the act (perceived opportunity) are constantly challenged by daily events. While our assessment of these concepts through a cross‐sectional design yielded positive findings, this theorising is best examined through dynamic modelling in future research (Maher et al., ).…”

Content validity and methodological considerations in ecological momentary assessment studies on physical activity and sedentary behaviour: a systematic review

“…As stated in the inclusion criteria, all studies used EMA methodology, meaning that participants were signalled to complete assessments throughout the course of the day at random or fixed times (time-based sampling) or when exhibiting certain behaviours (event-based sampling). In this review, fourteen studies (70%) used timebased sampling [37,39,49,55,57,58,60,62,63,66,67,72], two studies (10%) used event-based sampling [54,68] and four studies (4/20: 20%) used a combination of both [52,61,64,65]. The total monitoring period duration varied from 1 day to 6 months.…”

Relations between social comparisons and physical activity among women in midlife with elevated risk for cardiovascular disease: an ecological momentary assessment study

“…Survey completion and PA monitor wear also were on par with or better than typical rates for EMA (cf. Maher et al, 2017 ) and were impressive for 10 days of assessment. However, precautions against the spread of COVID-19 resulted in a smaller sample size than intended, and despite efforts to recruit a diverse sample, majority of participants were Caucasian and highly educated.…”