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Promoting Physical Activity in Teenage Girls 

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Promoting Physical Activity in Teenage Girls 

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Kieran Rafter - 20080697
David O'Brien - 20079409
Jamie Flynn - 20081097

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Intervention and its Aims (Social Media)

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Intervention and its Aims (Social Media)

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Social media had become widely popular and increasingly popular among teenage girls,  interventions through social media offer many advantages , these include social support, ready accessibility and mass delivery.  Research has shown that teenagers value enjoyment and spending time with friends and being fit and appealing to the opposite gender and these should be taken into account when delivering these interventions., We will use these in the intervention to help the appeal to teenage girls.

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A study by Van Kessel, Kavanagh, and Maher (2016) was conducted to show that a social media marketing approach to explore teenage girls perceptions of physical activity and the potential use of online social networks  would work to engage them in physical activity. This study found that physical was most appealing when it emphasized sport, exercise and fitness and also opportunities for socialization with friends. Physical activity was best received by use of social media and Facebook the most popular. Smartphones is what the teenagers used the most to access this and physical activity promotion such as walking, use of humor, use of cartoon imagery was seen as uncool.

A study carried out using a supportive group within a social networking site to firstly identify the main reasons given by teenage girls as to why they feel their daily physical activity levels are low and what ways they feel would aid in increasing their physical activity levels. The supportive group created for this study was found to significantly aid in reducing the barriers found in this study which mainly included not receiving sufficient support from family and friends, the supportive group was found to tackle this barrier and the pedometer also included in the social networking site was also found to promote the participants to reach their self-established daily step goal (Toscos, 2008).

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Policy - schools should be encouraging teachers to be taking breaks throughout their classes in which they should promote physical activity of the students especially in longer/double classes where students will be sitting in the class for over an hour otherwise. Also active travel can be used to increase the activity levels of the secondary school students who live in close proximity to their school (van Sluijs, 2009). Social media can be used as a means of promoting this idea to a greater scale especially in teenagers.

Environmental - increasing the amount of green areas has been found to increase the physical activity levels of the local and having safe well lit up tracks which allow people to run, cycle or walk on whenever they want (Humpel, 2002). The safety aspect is one that is especially important for teenage girl which is needed in order for them to be able to make use of the facilities and be able to increase their activity levels. Improvements in cycle lanes would also be needed to allow for this to work as an increase in the amount of people using active travel as a means of transport would require better infrastructure to be safe.

Community - initiatives such as "Park Runs" also can be used as a method of increasing physical activity providing a group of people who can regularly run together and social media can be a very effective tool for promoting this in being able to reach a greater audience, allow people to share and invite their friends to it and be able to have a group message board where all members would be able to talk and possibly help motivate each other and keep up to date of when the events will be held.

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Physical activity has been shown to have many health benefits for teenage and also social benefits, these include greater bone density, healthy body weight, fitness and self esteem  (Trost, 2005).  With this information, teenage girls have been shown to  at risk for physical inactivity and this group gets less PA than boys the same age  (Nelson, Neumark-Stzainer, Hannan, Sirard, & Story, 2006). Studies have shown that only 19% of teenagers meet the physical activity guidelines of 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day (Statistics, 2013)

Explanation of Intervention:

The idea of the intervention is to use the universal popularity of social media platforms to create fitness challenges that may raise physical activity primarily among teenage girls. Challenges such as the #DoitforDan five kilometre walk or run were the participant is required to walk or run a distance of five kilometres and post there time and then nominate five other friends to do the same and also to make a donation to the chosen charity. the benefits of challenges like this is that it can be done at the participants chosen pace so a starting level of fitness is not needed, there isn’t any equipment needed to complete the challenge and a clear progression is to try and improve the initial time the distance is completed. In terms of the health benefits that are possible from challenges such as this would be improved aerobic fitness, improved cardiovascular fitness, the increase In activity could cause a reduction in body fat percentage or Body mass index (BMI) and reduced risk of Heart disease. Research done by (Tuckman & Hinkle, 1986) showed than regular aerobic exercise not only increased measures of aerobic health but it also deemed effective in improve creativity among school goers. Another study carried out by (Roth, 1989) shows that even just one bout of aerobic activity of just twenty minutes reduces level of anxiety and stress.
This reduction in stress and anxiety paired with the possible improvements in body composition could create more positive outlook of being physically active by improving not only the health of the individual but also mental health aspects such as body image and self-confidence. The idea of using social media challenges to do this has great potential popularity as the idea of nominating other friends to do it creates the possibility that for every one participant five more will take part. It could also become a social aspect if small groups of friends met up to participate in the challenge together.

How we Plan to Implement it:

Implementing a challenge similar to the #DoitforDan would not cost any money to implement as social media is free to use. In terms of introducing the challenge into social media an idea would be to try and have an initial group of participants who will then nominate a number of others. Having an initial group like this would increase the frequency that it would be seen from some ones news feed. It would also increase the starting number of participants as not everyone who is nominated might participate. Starting a social media account for the initiative would also help as if it started to gain followers then other challenges can be started from this account. The social media accounts could also interact with other media “influencers” to further spread challenges.

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Nelson, M. C., Neumark-Stzainer, D., Hannan, P. J., Sirard, J. R., & Story, M. (2006). Longitudinal and secular trends in physical activity and sedentary behavior during adolescence. Pediatrics, 118(6), e1627-e1634.

Toscos, T., Faber, A., Connelly, K., & Upoma, A. M. (2008, January). Encouraging physical activity in teens Can technology help reduce barriers to physical activity in adolescent girls?. In 2008 Second International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (pp. 218-221). IEEE.

Trost, S. G. (2005). Discussion paper for the development of recommendations for children's and youth's participation in health promoting physical activity.

Humpel, N., Owen, N., & Leslie, E. (2002). Environmental factors associated with adults’ participation in physical activity: a review. American journal of preventive medicine, 22(3), 188-199.

van Sluijs, E. M., Fearne, V. A., Mattocks, C., Riddoch, C., Griffin, S. J., & Ness, A. (2009). The contribution of active travel to children's physical activity levels:

cross-sectional results from the ALSPAC study. Preventive medicine, 48(6),

519-524.

STATISTICS, A. B. O. (2013). Australian: Health Survey: Physical Activity, 2011-12.

Van Kessel, G., Kavanagh, M., & Maher, C. (2016). A qualitative study to examine feasibility and design of an online social networking intervention to increase physical activity in teenage girls. PloS one, 11(3).

Roth, D. L. (1989). Acute Emotional and Psychophysiological Effects of Aerobic Exercise. Psychophysiology.

Tuckman, B. W., & Hinkle, J. S. (1986). An experimental study of the physical and psychological effects of aerobic exercise on schoolchildren. Health Psychology., 197-207.