Black Girls Run Too: A Content Analysis of the Black Girls Run National Facebook Group
ABSTRACT
Background:
Recent evidence suggests that 59-73% of Black women are not reaching recommended targets for physical activity (PA). PA is a key modifiable lifestyle factor that can help mitigate risk for chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension, which disproportionately affect Black women. Online communities focused on PA have been emerging in recent years as virtual gathering spaces to provide support for PA in specific populations.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to conduct a content analysis of the Black Girls Run (BGR) Facebook page, which is devoted to promoting PA in Black women and has over 230,000 followers. Such data can inform future social media-based interventions.
Methods:
We collected 397 posts and associated engagement data from the national Black Girls Run Facebook page for the 6-month period between June 1, 2021 and December 31, 2021. We then conducted a content analysis of these posts and examined which types of posts elicited the most engagement.
Results:
The content analysis revealed 8 categories of posts: shout-outs (30.7%), goals/motivational (16.3%), announcements (15.9%), sponsored/ads (13.6%), health-related (11%), the lived Black experience (5.79%), self-care (3.78%), and holidays/greetings (2.02%). The 397 posts attracted a total of 55,573 engagements. Of these, 33,560 were “reactions” (e.g., likes) and 5,082 were shares. Shout-out posts elicited the highest engagement (22,268 engagements), followed by goals/motivational posts (11,490 engagements).
Conclusions:
The majority of content on the BGR Facebook page (62.9%) was focused on celebrating member achievements, motivating members to get active, and announcing and promoting active events. This content also attracted 75% of the engagement on this page. BGR appears to be a rich online community that offers social support for PA as well as culturally-relevant health and social justice content. Online communities may be uniquely positioned to engage minoritized populations in health behavior. Further research should explore how to best leverage online communities in interventions to increase PA and other lifestyle behaviors. Clinical Trial: n/a
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.