Social support among older adults in group physical activity programs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Group physical activity programs provide opportunities for older adults to receive social support, which is known to be positively associated with physical activity behavior in this population, but further research is needed to understand how this happens. The purpose of this study was to determine the social support needs and challenges experienced by older adults participating in group physical activity programs and identify social support functions and behaviors that enabled their engagement. Using interpretive description methodology, 16 field observations of classes, eight focus group discussions, and interviews with two participants who were unable to attend focus groups were conducted with adults aged 55 and older attending programs across four recreation facilities. Analysis of the data suggested that (a) there is a need for fostering social relationships in programs, which are imperative for receiving social support. Older adults in the programs supported other participants by (b) initiating their engagement in (more) physical activity, (c) helping them sustain their engagement in physical activity, (d) assisting them with recognizing successful engagement in physical activity, and (e) providing comfort and reassurance during difficult times. Social support behaviors that target older adults’ emotional and tangible needs may be most important for promoting and sustaining physical activity. Support provided by other older adults enhanced participants’ motivation and abilities to overcome obstacles, as well as enabled them to pursue opportunities for growth in their unique physical activity journeys. Lay summary: Social support can promote physical activity in older adults, but how forms of support are provided must be considered. This qualitative study examined the social support needs and experiences of older adults participating in group physical activity programs to determine social support functions and behaviors that enabled their engagement.IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICEGroup physical activity programs should aim to foster social relationships among older adult participants in order for them to receive social support that is sensitive and responsive to their needs.Instructors of group physical activity programs should encourage cultural awareness and acceptance among older adult participants for closer social relationships to be developed.Instructors of group physical activity programs should encourage social support behaviors among participants that target older adults’ emotional and tangible needs to sustain their engagement.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.002 |
| 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 it