Evaluating timeframe expectancies in physical activity social cognition: are short- and long-term motives different?

Promoting maintenance of regular physical activity (PA) is a public health priority; however, to the authors' knowledge, no researchers to date have examined whether the expectancies of proximal PA enactment are similar to the expectancies of longer maintenance. Thus, the authors' purpose in this study was to evaluate whether PA expectancies, measured with constructs of the theory of planned behavior (TPB), varied as a function of time frame (no time frame, next week, next month, next 6 months). Undergraduate students (N=409) completed randomly distributed self-report measures of the TPB; the authors then compared results across the 4 groups (formed on the basis of time frame). Analysis of variance tests showed that 13 of 37 constructs were significantly (p<.05) different, and post hoc follow-up tests identified that the proximal time frame (ie, next week) had the significantly lowest mean value. Chi-square tests of independent correlations, however, revealed few differences in TPB-intention correlations by time frame. The results suggest that social cognitive correlates of PA intention are robust to timeframe deviations but that time frame may affect the absolute values of some constructs. Overall, this is a positive finding because it suggests that PA promotion efforts focused on increasing expectancies do not have to be tailored to proximal or more distal maintenance applications.