Speaking of Values: Value-Expressive Communication and Exercise Intentions

ABSTRACT

This study introduces the concept of value-expressive communication and examines its relationship with behavioral intent. Value-expressive communication is conceptualized as the verbal output of a value-expressive attitude. Value-expressive communication about exercise is examined in relationship to strength of religious faith, exercise attitudes, communication frequency, and intentions to exercise among a sample of self-identified Christians. The data indicate a significant interaction between value-expressive communication and communication frequency explains significant variance in exercise intentions. Interact to and exercise attitudes is significantly associated with intentions to exercise. Suggestions for using value-expressive communication in health communication research and practice are discussed.

Notes

1. As value-expressive attitudes and communication of non-value-expressive attitudes were not measured in this study, tests of parallelism between those measures and VEC cannot be conducted.

2. The authors would like to acknowledge an anonymous reviewer for their review comments which prompted the inclusion of communication frequency in the analysis. Its relationship with other study variables was not predicted in the original study hypotheses.

3. An additional goal of this study was to test for the effects of value-matched messages on the study outcomes. Thus, the study variables were measured at two time points: prior to message exposure and after message exposure. Participants completed the second survey 18.96 days (SD = 10.89 days) after completing the first survey. No differences emerged between those who completed only the Time 1 survey and those who completed both surveys. We also found that experimental condition had no significant effects on study variables. This was tested first through separate regressions with value-expressive communication, exercise attitudes, and exercise intentions as outcome variables, and including age and individual health as covariates in step 1, then message condition as predictors in step 2. Secondly, we used experimental conditions as covariates in the analysis reported in the current paper; producing a model with age, individual health, and experimental conditions as covariates in step 1, then VEC and attitudes in step 2, and exercise intentions as the outcome variable. In this model, too, the experimental conditions were non-significant predictors. Thus, they were not included in the analyses presented in this article, which deal only with Time 2 data.