Understanding seat‐belt use: A test of Bentler and Speckart's extension of the ‘theory of reasoned action’

It is shown that Fishbein's ‘theory of reasoned action’ can be used to explain people's intentions to wear seat belts. As Bentler and Speckart (1979) have proposed, a self‐report measure of past behaviour is shown to significantly improve the model's power; this extended Fishbein model being capable of accounting for the majority of the effects that extraneous variables, which are known to influence seat‐belt use, have upon a person's behavioural intentions. In addition, it is shown that the model's motivation to comply term is, as Ajzen and Fishbein (1980) have proposed, a unipolar rather than a bi‐polar construct, but that even when this construct is scored as unipolar, it does not significantly add to the model's predictive power.