The Personal Incentives for Exercise Questionnaire: Preliminary Development

Drawing from the Theory of Personal Investment (Maehr & Brapkamp, 1986), preliminary work has been done on the development of an instrument, Personal Incentives for Exercise Questionnaire, to assess an individual's personal goals in exercise. The initial version of 85 items was administered to 212 male and 313 female undergraduates from a large midwestern university. The items reflected a variety of reasons for participating in exercise activities and were generated from a review of literature on exercise psychology, Maehx and Braskamp's classification of personal incentives, and the open-ended responses of 165 adult exercise participants. Subjects indicated their agreement on a 5-point Likert scale for each reason.