Exploring Older Adult’s Views of the Age-Inclusivity of Physical Activity Websites Using the Think Aloud Method: Qualitative Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Older adults are the least active in our society and may face additional barriers to taking part in physical activity compared with those experienced by younger people because of factors such as lower digital literacy and negative stereotypes of aging. Objective: This study aimed to explore how older adults navigate websites that provide access to physical activity opportunities and facilities and make judgments about their suitability. Methods: Semistructured interviews were embedded within a think-aloud approach. Participants were shown a series of websites and asked to navigate through the websites as if they were going to take up what was on offer, articulating their thoughts and comments out loud as they progressed. Participants viewed up to 4 websites, rotated from a pool of 8, including leisure centers, exercise products, gyms, or community organizations. Additional questions were asked about perceptions of the inclusivity of the websites at the end of the interview. Digital recordings were made and transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using thematic analysis. Results: Nineteen participants (6 male and 13 female) aged between 65 and 84 years were recruited from southern England; one-third reported having poor digital ability prior to taking part. Three overarching themes relating to the research question were identified as follows: (1) signals of age-inclusivity, (2) limiting beliefs, and (3) confidence in making judgments. Older adults inferred a lot of information about how welcome they would be in physical activity settings from the images and language used on websites. They showed a preference for imagery that was inclusive of age, body shape, and physical ability, not only for those depicting older adults themselves. Some adults reported firm views about the type and intensity of physical activity that is appropriate for older adults, and many expressed a specific dislike of gyms, based on both the (young) age of most users and perceived emphasis towards aesthetic rather than health-related exercise. While most participants could navigate websites successfully, they preferred to visit venues and speak to staff to gain greater confidence that they would feel welcome and that the activities would be at a suitable level. Conclusions: Websites providing access to physical activity could be more inclusive of older adults by using more diverse imagery, providing clearer descriptions of the activities on offer, along with details of the level of fitness or ability needed to take part, and providing alternatives to web-based booking. Additional societal-level approaches to reducing age-limiting self-stereotyping may also be useful in expanding the opportunities for older adults to access mainstream provisions for physical activity.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".