The Development and Validation of the Health Behavior Motivation Scale

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Health Psychology
• Behavioral Science

Background:

• Motivation significantly influences health behaviors.
• Existing measures may not fully capture the nuances of motivation for pro-health actions.
• Self-Determination Theory (SDT), specifically Organismic Integration Theory (OIT), provides a robust framework for understanding motivation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To construct and validate the Health Behavior Motivation Scale (HBMS) for assessing motivation toward pro-health behaviors in healthy adults.
• To examine the psychometric properties, including factorial structure, validity, and reliability, of the HBMS.
• To explore distinct motivational profiles related to health behaviors.

Main Methods:

• Linguistic validation with expert judges.
• Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) with Horn's Parallel Analysis.
• Convergent/discriminant validity, internal reliability, and test-retest reliability assessments.
• Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) to identify motivational profiles.

Main Results:

• The HBMS demonstrated a 5-dimensional structure: intrinsic regulation, integrated and identified regulation, introjected regulation, external regulation, and amotivation.
• The scale exhibited good convergent and discriminant validity, internal reliability, and test-retest reliability.
• LPA identified two distinct regulatory profiles associated with differences in health-related behaviors.

Conclusions:

• The Health Behavior Motivation Scale (HBMS) is a psychometrically sound instrument for measuring motivation in pro-health behaviors.
• The HBMS is suitable for use in both basic and applied research settings.
• The findings support the application of Self-Determination Theory in understanding health behavior motivation.