Introduction: In addition to many positive effects of physical activity on metabolism, physical and mental health, it provides students with relaxation and has a good effect on their well-being and academic achievement. Despite of all the above, many of them are still not physically active enough. Health sciences students are future health professionals, so it is important to understand their motives for health-beneficial behaviour. Motives are goal-oriented reasons for certain behaviours that arouse and sustain from needs. When an individual is motivated by social contacts, competence or pleasure, this is usually related to internal (intrinsic) motivation, whereas motives for improving appearance or health are more often related to external (extrinsic). Purpose: The purpose of this graduate work is to determine the motives for physical activity of the students of the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ljubljana. It was being determined whether there is a difference between the sexes, fields of study, academic years or age of students, and the relationship between the physical activity level and types of motivation. Methods: A non-experimental study was performed using a quantitative descriptive approach. Data were collected with an online survey questionnaire, which contained the Slovenian form of the questionnaire »Motives for Physical Activity Measure – revised« and some demographic questions. Analysis of 268 completed questionnaires was performed with statistical data processing programs IBM SPSS Statistics and Microsoft Excel. Results: The results have shown that students are most motivated by health care, followed by appearance, and least by social contacts. According to gender, a statistically significant difference in the motives of pleasure and competence was discovered. Both motives are more important to the male sex. A moderately positive association was found between the physical activity level and the motives of pleasure and competence. According to the field of study, statistically significant differences in the motives of pleasure and competence were determined. No significant association was discovered between the motives and the academic year or age of the student. Discussion and conclusion: Students of the Faculty of Health Science are mainly extrinsically motivated. More intrinsically motivated for physical activity are male students, students with a higher frequency of doing sports and, compared to some other fields of study, students of Physiotherapy and Sanitary Engineering. The cause-and-effect relationship between these results should be investigated in more detail.
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