Beyond The Gym: How Culture And Religion Influence Physical Activity In Pregnant Arab Muslim Individuals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) poses potential risks to pregnant individuals and their children. Arab individuals are at high-risk for GDM, and scarce information exists on strategies for GDM prevention with cultural and religious sensitivity. PURPOSE: To explore the influence of culture and religion on physical activity behaviors of pregnant Arab Muslim individuals. METHODS: Arab Muslim individuals were recruited through purposive sampling in London, Canada. Community and research team designed questions allowed participants to share their personal experiences and beliefs regarding physical activity during pregnancy through 2-hour structured interviews in either English or Arabic. The interviews were translated and transcribed. Summative content analysis was used to identify patterns in daily physical activities and exercise amongst participants. Thematic analysis was used to code information and reveal themes regarding the influence of culture and religion on physical activity behaviors. RESULTS: Mean age of the 32 participants (11 pregnant; 21 recently pregnant) interviewed was 30.9 ± 6.5 years. Mean time since immigration was 7.4 ± 7.5 years with mean household size of 5.2 ± 2.1 persons. Of physical activities, cooking (93.8%) and grocery shopping (84.4%) were most popular. Over 96% of participants responded “Yes” to participating in walking and prayer and enjoying these activities. Overall, results demonstrated greater participation and enjoyment in daily physical activity compared to structured exercise. Culturally, participants discussed pleasure and purpose as motivators for physical activity and expressed hesitation towards particular exercises during pregnancy. The commitment to prayer and selecting physical activity that align with their religious beliefs were important factors in their behavior choices. CONCLUSION: Cultural and religious beliefs play an important role regarding physical activity behavior for pregnant Arab Muslim individuals. This information will help co-design interventions that are culturally and religiously sensitive to provide meaningful care in chronic disease prevention and management. Supported by: Children’s Health Research Institute (CHRI), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".