Procrastination and physical activity: The moderated mediating effect of grit

Abstract

Objective: To explore the relation between procrastination and physical activity in college students and test whether grit mediated, age and gender moderated the process. Participants: 610 college students (aged 20.07 ± 1.53; 45.2% males) in Shanghai. Methods: Procrastination, grit and physical activity were tested respectively by International Procrastination Scale, Grit-S scale and International Physical Activity Questionnaire. Results: Correlation analysis showed that procrastination, grit and physical activity were related in pairs. Procrastination was negatively correlated with physical activity. Grit mediated between procrastination and physical activity. Females showed stronger moderation effect from grit to physical activity than males, while the effect between procrastination and grit was more significant for the younger. Conclusion: The moderated mediating model provided a new strategy of improving personality traits which contributed to lack of physical activity. More psychologically relevant measures should be taken in reducing procrastination to improve physical activity via improving grit.

Keywords:

• College students
• grit
• mediating effect
• physical activity
• procrastination

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Shanghai Student Physical Fitness& Health Monitoring Center for the data used in this study. The authors also thank the participating students, teachers, schools, and staff.

The authors would like to thank the students who participated in this study and the graduate research assistants who aided in the data collection process.

Authors’ contributions

YT conceived and completed the statistical analyses, interpreted the data, and drafted the manuscript; HY designed and supervised the study, provided analytical tools and drafts manuscripts; ML critically provided data collection and revised the manuscript. PW, JZ, YY and TX provided data collection and comments on the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript and agree with the order of presentation of the authors.

Data availability

The original sequence data has been uploaded to NCBI and SRA as a biological project PRJNA 558220. Other original data are available as a Supplementary Tables file. Additional data are available on request from the authors. Methods are available as Supplementary Data.

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of China and received approval from the Institutional Review Board of Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Ethics statement

The study was approved by Ethics Review Committee for Human Science and Technology of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No. E2021100I.

Funding

This paper is supported by the National Social Science Found of China (NSSFC), No.18BTY082.