Examining the use of theory in physical activity interventions targeting children and adolescents: A systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The importance of conceptual development for the translatability of study findings is well established (Lewin, 1947). For complex behaviours, such as physical activity (PA) participation, applying a theoretical framework can promote an understanding of causal mechanisms (Brown et al., 2013). The purpose of this systematic review is to examine the use of theory in PA interventions targeting children (aged 5 to 11 years) and adolescents (aged 12 to 17 years). A systematic search for randomized and non-randomized controlled interventions identified 128 studies (78 children; 50 adolescent) that met the selection criteria. Studies were coded as theory-based or atheoretical, and for the presence or absence of PA-related psychosocial outcomes. In children and adolescents, 59% and 78% of interventions were theory-based, respectively. The application of theory (?2 (1, N = 128) = 4.94, p < .05) and reporting on PA-related psychosocial outcomes (?2 (1, N = 128) = 4.39, p < .05) were significantly more likely to occur in interventions targeting adolescents compared with those targeting children. Of studies that reported on psychosocial outcomes, theory-informed interventions were significantly more likely than atheoretical interventions to report positive changes in adolescents (?2 (1, N = 30) = 10.43, p < .01) but not in children. Findings will be discussed within the context of PA-related psychosocial constructs and the paucity of data surrounding their measurement in children. This review supports a need for PA interventions targeting children to consider theoretical frameworks and theoretical constructs as mediators of PA behaviour change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".