Finding the Context in Self-Regulation: Definition, Applications, and Implications of a Context-Based Organizational Framework

Abstract

There is wide variation in the empirical evidence of a relationship between self-regulation and health-related behaviors. This variability owes to, at least in part, a lack of systematic distinction between instances in which self-regulation could influence behavior and instances in which it could not, regardless of a person’s standing on this construct. Without this distinction, the true influence of self-regulation on behavior is aggregated with irrelevant relationships. This dissertation introduces a framework that systematically organizes the context into features common to and shared by self-regulation strategies, with the aim of improving the understanding of when and how self-regulation influences behavior. To start, Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of the ways in which context has been studied in social psychology and personality fields. Based on this summary, Chapter 2 introduces the framework for describing and organizing the features of contexts and then applies the framework to four self-regulation strategies. Chapter 2 ends with an illustration of how the framework can help identify when and how self-regulation can influence behavior. Chapters 3 through 6 empirically examine this framework by presenting the accepted versions of four published manuscripts. Specifically, Chapter 3 reports a qualitative study of descriptions of self-control challenges and their consequences, demonstrating that the contexts in which people make decisions about their behaviors shape what is possible, desirable, and overall adaptive. Chapter 4 reports a meta-analysis of the published and unpublished literature on the relationship between self-control and several behaviors within the domains of physical activity, healthy eating, and healthier sleep. The chapter discusses possible explanations for the variable associations between self-control and behaviors in these domains, including a lack of fit between what self-control assumes and what studies assess and the possibility that certain behaviors—as they were defined—relied on strategies other than self-control. Chapters 5 and 6 build upon Chapter 4 by examining how contextual changes shift the dynamic between self-regulation and behavior. Specifically, Chapter 5 reports a study that examined the influence of context on the relationship between self-regulation strategies and ten categories of behaviors. This study showed that context changes influenced the extent to which behaviors were habitual or routine-like, but that self-control reduced the likelihood that behavior changed along with the severity of context changes. Chapter 6 reports a secondary analysis of longitudinal data on substance use in adolescence. This study examined whether the context could overwhelm the protective effect of self-control against adolescent alcohol use. To conclude this dissertation, Chapter 7 offers a general discussion of how my work has investigated the various features of the proposed framework, how the proposed framework may be extended, and the directions of my future research.