Self-efficacy is a major factor in enabling individuals to follow behavioural goals. This applies to health behaviours including physical activity and exercise behaviour, a health topic especially important for persons suffering from health conditions. In subjects with already existing conditions, self-efficacy in exercise behaviour is a research field with a high volume of published articles, yet it has never been charted in its entirety. This systematic evidence map (SEM) provides a comprehensive overview of the current state in published empirical research.

Collecting, categorising and visualising the breadth of evidence via SEM following the Methods of Evidence Mapping by Schmucker et al.

Medline (via PubMed) and PsycINFO (via EbscoHost).

We searched for the terms ‘self-efficacy’ and any of the search terms ‘sport’ and ‘exercise’ in titles and abstracts. We included all empirical research studies published until 2022 that measured self-efficacy in relation to exercise. This SEM includes all studies on humans with a pre-existing condition. We extracted the data points authors, title, year, sample size (N), age groups, pre-existing condition(s), surveyed sport and method of measuring self-efficacy.

We extracted the data points from the full text (if available). In addition to a data table, we created a freely accessible evidence map in the form of graphs in this article.

The number of publications grew over time from single publications per year in the 1980s to over 100 per year in the beginning of the 2020s, adding up to 1342 included studies. Most research focuses on middle-aged and older adults. Research covers a wide variety of conditions, with endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases (22%) as well as diseases of the circulatory system (19%) being the most common disease groups. Most included studies (71%) do not specify a sport. Most (55%) papers used validated scales to measure self-efficacy, and we discovered 235 individually named scales among them.

This paper offers the first ever comprehensive list of empirical publications on self-efficacy in exercise behaviour in persons with pre-existing conditions in the form of a SEM. The research field was as wide as anticipated concerning total numbers, number of individual scales for measuring self-efficacy, as well as range in diagnosed conditions. Most research focusing on advanced age may be due to many diseases only manifesting later in life, and the lack of specification in types of sport points to the choice of sport being less important than getting enough exercise in general. Future research should examine the strength of evidence and the robustness and comparability of self-efficacy scales as well as underrepresented disease groups for public health considerations.

Since no primary data was collected, an ethics approval is not required for the presented work. In addition to the result being disseminated via the publication at hand, the data is being shared in detail via the Open Science Framework platform.