The relationship between physical activity and college students' perceived social support: The mediating role of social–emotional competence and its gender differences

The aim of this research was to examine the correlation among college students' physical activity, social–emotional abilities, gender and their perception of social support. The survey was conducted among 408 college students from Jiangsu, Shandong and Hubei provinces utilising the Perceived Social Support Scale, the Social–Emotional Competence Scale for Chinese College Students and the Physical Activity Scale (PARS-3). SPSS 27.0 and the Process 4.1 plug-in developed by Hayes were used to perform common method bias tests, independent samples t-tests, descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, and moderated mediation model tests on the data. (1) After controlling for variables such as educational attainment and professional background, physical activity was found to exert a significant and favourable influence on college students' perception of social support (β = .11, p<.001). (2) The relationship between physical activity and college students' perception of social support was moderated by their social–emotional skills. The mediation effect size was calculated to be 54.33%. (3) Gender moderates the relationship between physical activity and college students' perceptions of social support (β = .09, t = 2.01, p<.05). Physical activity not only directly affects college students' perceived social support, but also indirectly through social–emotional competence; gender has a significant moderating effect on the direct effect of physical activity on college students' perceived social support. Specifically, female students had a more significant positive predictive effect on perceptual social support than male students. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.