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TopIntroduction: Overview Of Physical Activity
Physical activity and health promotion programs are beneficial and effective at improving older adult's physical and mental health, especially when conceptualized based on factors that influence positive health behavior change (Bardach, Schoenberg, & Howell, 2016; Kanaoka & Mutlu, 2015). Community-based programs further promote increased adherence to healthy life choices among older adults (Cardalda, López & Carral, 2019; Rohani, Malekahmadi, Eslami, Ghaderi, Bidkhori, Raei & Fazel, 2015; Siegler, Lama, Knight, Laureano & Reid, 2015). Older adults are more likely than others to require individualized or tailored care to stay healthy, because they stand a higher risk of developing chronic health conditions such as falls, diabetes, stroke, heart diseases and cancer that may disrupt later life enjoyment (Rezende, de Rodrigues Lopes, Rey-López, Matsudo, & Luiz, 2014; Tremblay, Aubert, Barnes, Saunders, Carson, Latimer-Cheung, Chastin, Altenburg & Chinapaw, 2014), and especially worse for individuals who live inactive lives (Puts, Toubasi, Andrew & Ashe et al., 2017; Wanigatunga, Simonsick, Zipunnikov, Spira, Studenski, Ferrucci & Schrack, 2018). Studies on physical activity and aging suggest that as people age, the likelihood of loss in physical function (de Carvalho, Epping-Jordan, Pot & Kelley, Toro, Thiyagarajan & Beard, 2017) and cognitive abilities (Cardalda, López & Carral, 2019) increases at variable degrees of severity (Karunananthan, Wolfson, Bergman, Béland & Hogan, 2009). However, there are gaps in knowledge on what program methodologies, approaches and practices help motivate older people to stay active, or engage in leisure activities to prevent adverse health conditions.
This study aims at understanding the factors that motivate older adults in a community setting, to participate in exercise and maintain positive health behaviors by identifying and evaluating discussions with them on their experiences as members of the fitness program meant for older persons.
The findings from this research is important to program designers, policy makers and health professionals who work with older people, as it would highlight salient programmatic practices and issues that must be considered when setting up / or recommending exercise programs, and strategies for engaging this population.
To achieve this, we provide a brief background information about the benefits of physical activity in the literature, the study context, then followed by presentation of findings as reported by respondents from the semi-structured interview conducted. The interview questions for this research was guided by Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 2011), and the International Physical Activity questionnaire, IPAQ (Brach, Perera, Gilmore, VanSwearingen, Brodine, Nadkarni & Ricci, 2017; Booth, Lowis, Dean, Hunter & Mckinley, 2012). We also highlight participants’ self-reported benefits derived from exercising. All responses are presented using discourse analysis approach (Brown et al., 1983). Our goal is to elicit individual, organizational and environmental influence on program delivery processes that produced the most behavior change, rather than the range of exercise activities provided or attended.