[[alternative]]The Intention of Weight Control Among the Junior High School Students in Taipei County, Taiwan

[[abstract]]The main purpose of this study was to investigate the junior school students’ beliefs and related factors regarding intention of weight control by using the Theory of Planned Behavior(TPB). By using stratified cluster sampling method, the respondents were selected from 7-9 grade students of a junior high school in Taipei County in school year of 2006. The structured questionnaire was used to collect the data for the study. Totally, 450 effective questionnaires were analyzed. The main findings of the study were as follows: 1.Around half of the respondents showed the positive behavioral intention for weight control in the next two months. 2.The attitude and subjective norm explained 19.2% of variance of the intention of weight control; the perceived behavior control added 5.1% explanation power. Thus, the explanation power of these three variables accounted for 24.3%. Among them, attitudes affect the weight control intention most. 3.The attitudes of respondents towards weight control were significant positively related to the product of behavioral beliefs multiplied by evaluations of outcomes (ΣBi＊Ei). Also, the subjective norm of respondents’ weight control were significant positively related to the product of normative beliefs multiplied by motivations to comply (ΣNBj＊MCj). The perceived behavior control of respondents’ weight control was negative related to the control beliefs. Generally, the results of this study supported the hypothesis of TPB and revealed that TPB was a little better than the Theory of Reasoned Action on predicting the behavioral intention of weight control.