General vs health-specific consideration of immediate and future consequences to predict eating and exercise behavior in a Norwegian student population: A randomized survey experiment

Abstract

Over several decades, the consideration of future consequences (CFC) construct has been used to explain and predict health behaviors. However, the reported associations between CFC and health behaviors are relatively weak, leading to the low explanatory power of the models. Recent research suggests that CFC can be a domain-specific construct. In this study, we explored the psychometric properties of the Norwegian CFC-general and CFC-health questionnaires in terms of factor structure and discriminant and convergent validity and tested the association between the general and domain-specific CFC and exercise and eating behaviors. In a randomized survey experiment, 1,001 university students were assigned to either a CFC-general or a CFC-health questionnaire. In the tested models, two dimensions of CFC, consideration of immediate consequences (CFC-I) and consideration of future consequences (CFC-F), were independent variables. The exercise and eating behaviors, measured both as self-evaluated behaviors and self-reported frequency measures, were dependent variables. The results showed that in both CFC-general and CFC-health, CFC-I and CFC-F are distinct dimensions that differentially explain variance in health behaviors. A domain-specific CFC-health explained a significantly higher amount of variance in self-reported eating and exercising behaviors than a general CFC. Self-evaluated health behaviors were better explained by CFC than self-reported behavioral frequencies. Practical implications of the findings and avenues for future research are discussed.