Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Nov 11, 2023
Date Accepted: Sep 22, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Leveraging Reddit to explore motivational factors that impact the performance of- and adherence to physical activity
ABSTRACT
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 why individuals perform PA and their strategies 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. 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.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%). To conclude, this study presented a novel approach to investigate why people engage in PA and the strategies they use to adhere to PA using wide-scale, self-disclosed content from popular social media channels.
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