The Provision and Experience of Variety in Physical Activity Settings: A Systematic Review of Quantitative and Qualitative Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Emerging evidence indicates that the provision or experience of "variety" may be an important determinant of physical activity behavior. Variety refers to diverse endeavors, opportunities, or tasks and, in the context of physical activity, has been examined as a feature of an activity or environment (i.e., variety support) and an experience (i.e., one's felt experience or perceived variety). OBJECTIVE: The primary aim of our review was to synthesize studies investigating the provision or experience of variety in physical activity settings on health and well-being, behaviors, and motivation. Our secondary aim was to examine quantitative data reporting on different facets of variety in physical activity settings. METHODS: We conducted a systematic search of five electronic databases (Scopus, SPORTDiscus, Science Direct, MEDLINE, and the Human Kinetics Library) to identify studies providing a quantitative or qualitative assessment of variety in physical activity settings. RESULTS: We identified 5,576 potentially relevant articles to examine. After title and abstract screening (and removal of duplicates), 74 articles remained for full-text screening, from which 28 studies were deemed eligible. Our findings from qualitative and quantitative (experimental and cross-sectional) studies demonstrate that the provision and experience of variety relates to participation and engagement in physical activity, motivation for exercise and physical activity, and well-being outcomes. Our results also indicate that the provision of variety can increase enjoyment, interest (i.e., motivation), and adherence to a physical activity program. CONCLUSION: Our findings support the assertion that variety should be considered during planning, implementation, and evaluation of physical activity programs. Additional experimental studies are needed to gain a better understanding of how elements of physical activity and exercise programs, delivery, and environment can be manipulated to increase variety and foster participation in physical activity.
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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 | 0.061 | 0.165 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.025 | 0.028 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".