Stage Discontinuity Examination of the Health Action Process Approach among the University Students Physical Exercise Behavior

Based on Health Action Process Approach(HAPA),this paper carried on longitudinal design within four months by investigating physical exercise behavior and related social cognitive variables of 580 non-sports specialty university students for three times.After the system investigation,examining the HAPA model fitness in the physical exercise of university students with a variety of goodness of structural equation model fit index(χ2/df,TLI,CFI,RMSEA),using confirmatory factor analysis to examine the measuring equivalents in various stages of HAPA model,using multi-group structural equation modeling to test the differences of latent means between the social cognitive variables and the path coefficient differences between variables in different stages.The results revealed that the HAPA model is suitable for physical exercise of university students;The three stage groups of HAPA model has measurement equivalence;The latent means of most social cognitive variables in various stages had stage differences,part of the path coefficient between variables had stage differences.This study partially verified the stage discontinuity of HAPA and provided evidence for tailored and stage-matched health behavior intervention in practice.