Mothers' intentions to support children's physical activity related to attention and implicit agreement with advertisements.

BACKGROUND

ParticipACTION's Think Again campaign targeted mothers who think their children are sufficiently active, yet whose children do not achieve recommended amounts of physical activity.

PURPOSE

This research examined the relationship of mothers' intentions to support children's physical activity with explicit believability and implicit agreement with the Think Again campaign message, attention paid to the advertisement, involvement with the issue, concern regarding children's inactivity, and attitudes.

METHOD

Participants were mothers from Edmonton, Canada (N = 102) who viewed one Think Again advertisement then completed a measure of implicit agreement with the campaign message and questionnaires.

RESULTS

The mothers who paid attention to the message and were concerned for their own children were more likely to intend to act on campaign messages. The majority of participants implicitly agreed that children's physical inactivity was a problem, but there was less agreement that physical inactivity was a problem for their own children.

CONCLUSION

Participants automatically tended to agree with campaign messages when the focus was on children in general, but there was greater disagreement when asked about participant's own children. Why most mothers were not in agreement with the reality of how much physical activity their children needs remains to be determined.