Associations Between Attitudes Toward Physical Education and Aerobic Capacity in Hungarian High School Students

The purpose of this study was to create a physical education (PE) attitude scale and examine how it is associated with aerobic capacity (AC).

Participants (n = 961, aged 15-20 years) were randomly selected from 26 Hungarian high schools. AC was estimated from performance on the Progressive Aerobic Cardiovascular and Endurance Run test, and the attitude scale had 31 items measured on a Likert scale that ranged from 1 to 5. Principal component analysis was used to examine the structure of the questionnaire while several 2-way analyses of variance and multiple linear regression (MLR) were computed to examine trends in AC and test the association between component scores obtained from the attitude scale and AC, respectively.

Five components were identified: health orientation in PE (C1), avoid failure in PE (C2), success orientation in PE (C3), attitude toward physical activity (C4), and cooperation and social experience in PE (C5). There was a statistically significant main effect for sex on C3 (p < .05), C4 (p < .001), and C5 (p < .05) indicating that boys' scores were higher than girls. The Sex × Age interaction was also statistically significant (p < .05) and follow-up comparisons revealed sex differences in C5 for 15-year-old participants. Girls showed statistically significant higher values than boys in C5 at the age of 16 years. MLR results revealed that component scores were significantly associated with AC (p < .05). Statistically significant predictors included C1, C2, C3, and C4 for boys and C2 and C4 for girls.

The 5-component scale seems to be suitable for measuring students' attitudes toward PE. The design of the study does not allow for direct associations between attitudes and AC but suggests that these 2 might be related.