Social support and emotions in group physical activity programs for older adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social support can encourage physical activity among older adults, and group exercise creates an opportunity for social connection. Understanding interpersonal actions which support physical activity and participants' emotional responses to these exchanges can have motivational implications. This study examined older adults' emotional experiences with social support in group exercise programs and their connections to motivation. As part of a larger study using interpretive description methodology, ten focus groups were conducted with 29 female and 9 male older adults (Mage=69.5 years) participating in group exercise at civic recreation centers. Emotional responses to support interactions were interpreted and analyzed. Four themes highlighted motivating impacts of emotional responses to support interactions. Positive social interactions made exercise fun. Checking on each other if they missed classes, sharing information about health, and instructors' corrections to prevent injury were experienced as compassionate. Knowing absences would be noticed was associated with anticipated guilt, motivating attendance. Seeing peers' diverse bodies and abilities, and instructor cues and options aimed at enabling success decreased anticipated shame and enhanced pride. Four themes highlighted demotivating impacts. Instructors chastising or encouraged to push beyond their limits, however, was humiliating and prompted disengagement. Frustration occurred when instructors were unresponsive to participant needs, or peers provided unwanted support. Loneliness occurred if they felt excluded from peer gatherings. Finally, accessing support was difficult if initiating interactions was anxiety provoking. Understanding how supportive attempts contribute to emotions and motivation is important for developing best practices for instructor and peer support in exercise among older adults.Acknowledgments: Funding: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".