Validation Of The Crave Scale For Motivation States Into Chinese In Healthy And Clinical Populations

It is well established that motivation states for movement and sedentarism vary by clinical status, particularly in conditions like RLS, akathisia, anorexia nervosa and others. However, this has never been explored with a validated instrument focused on motivation for physically active and inactive behaviors, such as the CRAVE (Stults-Kolehmainen et al., 2021), which has two subscales - Move and Rest. PURPOSE: The purpose of these studies are to: A) adapt the scale into Chinese (CRAVE-C), B) examine relationships of motivation states with other affect-based exercise scales, and C) compare responses between healthy people from the population versus 2 patient populations. METHODS: In study 1, a team of nine professionals translated and adapted the CRAVE scale into Chinese. Participants completed the CRAVE-C, AFFEXX-C and PES-C scales. 500 individuals recruited online with valid responses were retained for the analysis. EFA analysis was conducted. In Study 2, there were two separate and mutually exclusive patient groups: psychiatric patients (n = 33) and chronic illness patients (n = 62). Importantly, no individual in the psychiatric group had a chronic illness, and vice versa. RESULTS: The EFA found a two-factor structure. Factors were inversely correlated (r = -.57). The Chinese revised 10-item model had a better model fit (RMSEA = .073, SRMR = .028, CFI = .98, TLI = .97) compared to other models. Move was associated with “core affective exercise experiences” (r = .70) and exercise approach (.62). It was inversely related to exercise avoidance (-.48). In Study 2, large differences were discovered between the psychiatric and chronic health groups for Move (d = -.84) and between the normal and psychiatric groups for Rest (d = -.92). CONCLUSIONS: The CRAVE-Chinese scale is valid and performs best with the revised 10-item scoring. We found that individuals with a more positive emotional experience associated with exercise are more likely to have higher state desire for physical activity in their daily lives. Furthermore, significant and large differences in the desires to be active and inactive were found between normal, psychiatric, and chronic condition populations. Thus, the CRAVE-C can offer insights into motivations related to physical activity and inactivity in the Chinese population.