Abstract
The purpose of this study was to develop a social support scale for medical fitness club users, and to investigate the relationships between the length of exercise and a social support for medical fitness club users.
The subjects were 202 medical fitness club users (male: 72, female: 130) who were provided exercise instructions for by health fitness programmers, and completed the questionnaires.
Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to analyze social support items, and 2 factors (instrumental support: 8 items, emotional support: 8 items) were extracted.
Additionally, reliability and validity were confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha and confirmatory factor analysis. The result suggested that a social support scale for medical fitness club users have enough validity and reliability.
Furthermore, the result of examination of relationships between the length of exercise and a social support for medical fitness club users showed that medical fitness club users less than a year needed more both instrumental support and emotional support than those of a year or more.
The developed scale might be used to measure a social support for medical fitness users to examine promotion of exercise adherence.
