Date of Award

2021

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Psychology

Specialization

Clinical Psychology

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Mark Robbins

Abstract

Despite its well-documented success in differentiating stage of change (SOC) for readiness for regular exercise among primarily White populations, the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) exercise constructs have shown inconsistent results in understudied populations, such as Black and Hispanic/Latinx adults (Spencer et al., 2006). This cross-sectional study attempts to understand this trend by considering barriers to regular exercise among these populations. This study describes the development and validation of a novel barriers construct, as well as adapted constructs of Self-Efficacy (SE) and Decisional Balance (DB) within the TTM framework. Black and Hispanic/Latinx adults (n = 450) were recruited to complete this study.

Exploratory and confirmatory analyses produced one Pros and two Cons' scales for the DB inventory, two scales for the SE inventory, and three scales for the Barriers inventory. Expected patterns for SE and Pros by SOC were found, while the anticipated results for Cons were not found. It was expected that Barriers would decrease with increasing SOC, however change across SOC was not significant and the opposite trend was found. These findings suggest that barriers to regular exercise might be progressively realized as individuals progress through SOC or may not be important to the sample studied. They also suggest that traditional TTM constructs can be culturally tailored or improved by incorporating barriers to exercise without disrupting the frameworks' expected outcomes.

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