Reasoned Action Theory

Scope

TRA was developed to explain influences on behaviors that involve conscious decision making. It specifically excludes behaviors that are impulsive, habitual, or scripted. TRA would not be used, for example, to explain a frequent traveler's getting through airport security. Instead, the theory has been effectively applied to behaviors such as smoking and blood donation, over which the person has some choice. Although a noted limitation of the theory, its focus on voluntary behaviors is practical when targeting behavioral change in interventions.

Components

The ultimate outcome of TRA is prediction of behavior. The model predicts behavior based on seven causal variables—behavioral intention, attitude, subjective norm, belief strength, evaluation, normative belief, and motivation to comply. This section defines each of these and shows how [Page 827]together they predict behavior. We begin with behavioral intention.

Behavioral intentions—a person's plans, motivations or desires—are the most immediate predictor of one's behavior. For example, people are unlikely to exercise if they do not intend to work out. The intention to exercise itself may be predicted by prior planning such as bringing gym clothes or buying a gym membership. Of course, motivation can be lost and a plan can be dropped. When one is invited out for dinner, a good intention to go to the gym can be quickly abandoned. Thus, intentions are subject to change. Consequently, the intention component provides a good target for behavioral change campaigns because these can influence a person's intentions to perform a voluntary action such as using condoms or getting prostate or breast cancer screenings.

Intentions are not independent, but result from underlying attitudes and subjective norms. An attitude is a general orientation toward a behavior based on a variety of beliefs and evaluations. For example, if one strongly believes that unprotected sex can cause pregnancy and does not want to have a baby, this person will probably have a behavioral intention to use contraceptives. Specifically, an attitude is determined by identifying a set of relevant beliefs, measuring the strength, or certainty, of these beliefs, and measuring their evaluation as well. Once these steps are taken, the researcher sums these measures together, resulting in an attitude measurement.

Attitudes are specific to performing a particular behavior (e.g., smoking), not some attitude object (e.g., cigarettes). To determine an attitude, belief strength and evaluation are empirically weighted for a specific behavior and group before they are added together. These relative weights are discovered through surveys of individuals in the target audience about a behavior. The importance of attitudes, as determined through surveys, is helpful in designing intervention campaigns to address the component that best predicts behavioral intentions. Attitudes, however, are only one of the variables that determine intentions. The second, which also must be determined by a survey, is subjective norms.

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