The fitness boom and the pursuit of body ideals: domesticating the use of smartwatches in Ghanaian fitness spaces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores the use of smartwatches within fitness spaces in Ghana. As part of the fitness boom, the pursuit of body ideals has become increasingly intertwined with digital self-tracking, health, and moral imaginaries of self-improvement. The use of smartwatches in fitness spaces is crucial for understanding these connections. The study draws on interviews and participant observations with fitness enthusiasts in gyms and keep-fit clubs. We employ domestication theory to examine how smartwatches influence users’ understanding and construction of their fitness identities, social identities, and body ideals. Using these ethnographic methodologies and reflexive thematic analysis, our study reveals that smartwatches shape the Ghanaian understanding and construction of fitness and social identities. Practically, the participants have domesticated smartwatches to function as an infrastructure that promotes an active lifestyle. Symbolically, the device represents their socio-economic class and commitment to self-improvement. The findings suggest that as Ghanaian fitness enthusiasts strive to meet their fitness goals and conform to societal expectations of the ideal body, the smartwatch becomes a proxy for fitness, body ideals and communication convenience.
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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 | 0.031 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".