JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Despite the ample benefits of physical activity (PA), many individuals do not meet the minimum PA recommended by health organizations. Structured questionnaires and interviews are commonly used to study the reasons that lead individuals to perform PA and the strategies they implement to adhere to PA. However, certain biases are inherent to these tools that limit what can be concluded from their results. Collecting data from social media channels can complement these studies and provide a more comprehensive overview of PA motives and adherence strategies.

Objective:

The overall aim of this work is to study motives for engaging in physical activity, and the associated strategies to achieve these goals as stated by a large number of people over social media.

Methods:

We searched for users’ responses regarding PA motives and adherence strategies in “Reddit.com” forums dedicated to PA and analyzed the data using (1) unsupervised clustering to identify topics from the textual comments; and (2) supervised classification to classify the comments into the detected topics. A panel of experts participated in both steps for annotation and validation purposes.

Results:

We analyzed 1577 comments and found that the main reasons to participate in PA were physical appearance (mentioned in 23.9% of the comments), followed by improving physical and mental health (18.9% and 16.9%, respectively). The main strategies people use to adhere to PA were habit formation (30.0%), goal setting (13.9%), enjoyable activities (12.1%), socializing (9.7%), using media (8.9%), using different apps to monitor PA (2.8%) and financial commitment (2.5%).

Conclusions:

This study presented a novel approach to investigate the reasons people engage in PA and the strategies they use to adhere to PA using wide-scale, self-disclosed content from popular social media channels.