HLTH 2500 Week 5 Theory Application Paper Example

The Theory of Planned Behavior Taken Through Lunchtime Walking, Construct by Construct, With the Three Places Where the Fit Is Poor

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 2500: Theories of Health Behavior

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

The Theory of Planned Behavior Taken Through Lunchtime Walking, Construct by Construct, With the Three Places Where the Fit Is Poor

The Behavior and the Theory

The behavior is the lunchtime walk defined in Week 4: a brisk walk of ten minutes or more, on three or more workdays a week, for a month, by staff of a county office. The theory locates the causes of a behavior in intention and perceived behavioral control, and the causes of intention in three judgments: of the act itself, of others' expectations and of one's own control (Ajzen, 1991). In physical activity research specifically, a meta-analysis of 72 studies found that the theory's main relationships held and that it accounted for more variance in intention and behavior than its predecessor, the theory of reasoned action (Hagger et al., 2002). This paper takes each construct through the specified behavior in turn and argues how well it fits.

Attitude Toward the Behavior

Attitude rests on behavioral beliefs: what the worker expects walking at lunch would lead to, and how good or bad each outcome would be. For this behavior, likely beliefs include positive outcomes, such as feeling more alert in the afternoon, a break from the screen and time outside, and negative ones, such as arriving back sweaty, losing time to eat and losing time to run errands. A worker who weighs alertness heavily and sweat lightly will hold a favorable attitude.

Fit: good. The behavior has clear, nameable outcomes that workers can rate, and the attitude can be measured at the same level of specificity as the behavior. The likely gap is between attitude toward exercise in general, which is almost always favorable, and attitude toward this walk, which may not be.

Subjective Norm

Subjective norm rests on normative beliefs about specific people and the worker's motivation to comply with each. For lunchtime walking at a county office, the relevant referents are likely the supervisor, close coworkers and family. A supervisor who eats at their desk and expects quick replies over lunch signals that leaving the building is not expected. Coworkers who walk together signal the opposite.

Fit: moderate. The construct captures the supervisor's influence well. It captures less well the visible behavior of coworkers, because the subjective norm concerns what others think the worker should do, not what others actually do. Seeing colleagues walk may influence a worker even if the worker believes none of them has an opinion about it.

Perceived Behavioral Control

Perceived behavioral control rests on control beliefs: factors that would make walking easier or harder, and how strongly each would affect the worker. For this behavior, the factors are concrete: meetings scheduled over lunch, summer heat and winter cold, whether there is a pleasant and safe route from the building, whether the worker has comfortable shoes at work and whether the lunch break is long enough to walk and eat.

Fit: good for prediction, with a qualification taken up below. These beliefs are specific and measurable, and perceived control has two paths in the model, through intention and directly to behavior. For a behavior so dependent on the workday's conditions, the direct path is likely to matter.

Intention

Intention is the worker's readiness to walk on at least three lunch breaks a week for the next four weeks. If attitude is favorable, the supervisor and family are seen as supportive and the worker believes the walk is manageable, intention should be strong.

Fit: good as a predictor of intention itself; weaker as a bridge to behavior, discussed below.

Behavior

The behavior is counted weekly: at least three qualifying walks in five workdays. Because the behavior is specified by action, target, context and time, it can be measured directly with a log or a step counter, rather than inferred from general activity questions.

Fit: good. The specification makes the theory testable.

Where the Fit Is Poor

Poor Fit 1: The Lunch Routine Is a Habit

The theory treats behavior as the result of a reasoned decision. Many workers' lunch breaks are not decided each day; they follow a routine: open the container at the desk, eat while reading email, return to work. Wood and Neal (2007) describe habits as responses triggered by context, such as the time and place, that run with little deliberation even when a person's goals have changed. A worker with a strong desk-lunch habit may hold a favorable attitude, supportive norms, high perceived control and a firm intention to walk, and still eat at the desk because the routine runs before the intention is consulted. The theory has no construct for habit. Hagger et al. (2002) found that adding past behavior to the model weakened the relationships between intention and behavior, which suggests that something carried over from past behavior, plausibly habit, does part of the work the model assigns to intention.

Poor Fit 2: Control Changes Day to Day

Perceived behavioral control is measured once, as a general belief about the behavior over the coming weeks. Actual control at a county office varies daily: a meeting is moved to noon, a heat advisory is issued, a supervisor asks for a report by 1 p.m. A single measure of perceived control averages across days that are easy and days that are impossible. The theory trusts its direct path from perceived control to behavior only when perceived control tracks the real situation (Ajzen, 1991). When actual control is this variable, a one-time belief cannot reflect it well, and prediction suffers on exactly the days that matter.

Poor Fit 3: Intention Does Not Say When or How

A strong intention to walk three times a week does not specify which days, at what time or by which route. Experiments that raised intention moved behavior only about half as far as the model implies (Webb & Sheeran, 2006). If-then plans that name a cue and a response, called implementation intentions, have improved goal attainment substantially across many studies (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). The theory of planned behavior does not include planning of this kind. A worker who intends to walk "three times this week" and a worker who has decided "on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, when I finish eating at 12:20, I will take the river path" have the same intention score in the model but very different chances of walking.

Summary of the Fit

Table 1

Fit of Each Construct to the Specified Behavior

The theory fits the decision to walk well and fits the daily performance of walking less well.

Conclusion

The theory of planned behavior fits lunchtime walking well where the behavior is a decision: whether the worker values the walk, believes others support it and thinks it is manageable. It fits poorly where the behavior is a routine, where conditions change daily and where intention lacks a plan. These are the places a program built on the theory alone would be most likely to fall short.

References

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179-211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T

Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1

Hagger, M. S., Chatzisarantis, N. L. D., & Biddle, S. J. H. (2002). A meta-analytic review of the theories of reasoned action and planned behavior in physical activity: Predictive validity and the contribution of additional variables. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 24(1), 3-32. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.24.1.3

Webb, T. L., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Does changing behavioral intentions engender behavior change? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 249-268. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.2.249

Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2007). A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. Psychological Review, 114(4), 843-863. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843