Original ArticlesPredicting bicycle helmet stage-of-change among middle school, high school, and college cyclists from demographic, cognitive, and motivational variables
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were students who had ridden a bicycle in the past 6 months. We drew a convenience sample of seventh graders from a middle school and ninth graders from a high school that are part of the Paradise Valley Independent School District, which serves primarily a middle-class population in the suburbs of Phoenix. For our college sample, we recruited undergraduates from Arizona State University who participated in the study as a way of fulfilling a course requirement. This project was
Description of the sample and descriptive statistics
There were 988 respondents. After eliminating participants with missing data, our sample size was 797; 31% of the respondents were seventh graders, 28% were ninth graders, and the remaining 41% were college students (53% male). Of the students, 83% were White, non-Hispanic; 11% were Hispanic; 4% were Asian; 2% were African American; and the remaining 1% of the students were Native American. A bicycle was owned by 91% of the students, and 43% reported that they owned a helmet. The modal category
Discussion
Maibach and Cotton17 have described the most appropriate messages for people in each stage of the Prochaska model. For people in Precontemplation, interventions should: (1) enhance knowledge about the consequences of the risky behavior; (2) personalize the risk; (3) emphasize the benefits of the healthy behavior; and (4) encourage the patient to reevaluate the pros and cons of the healthy behavior. In contrast, interventions for people in the Contemplation stage should: (1) encourage actual
Acknowledgements
We thank Susan Bookspan for her valuable research assistance.
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