A Randomised Controlled Trial of a Brief Planning Intervention to Promote Physical Activity

Detailed Summary

People of low socioeconomic status are more inclined to incur poor health than those of high socioeconomic status. Different factors have been attributed to contributing to such health inequalities, including differences in modifiable lifestyle factors. For example, people of high socioeconomic status are more likely to engage in greater levels of physical activity, and are more inclined to adhere and take up population-level behaviour change interventions. Subsequently, there has been a call to create more targeted interventions designed to especially target people with low socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status represents availability and access to resources, and measures that are broadly divided into individual measures such as income, education and occupational status, and area-level or neighbourhood deprivation measures. However, while socioeconomic status is a multifaceted concept, there is a tendency in research to use a single measure (such as either income or education level) interchangeably to capture the full scope of socioeconomic status. This is based upon the assumption that one socioeconomic measure taps into the underlying features of another aspect of socioeconomic status, despite little being known about the effect each socioeconomic status measure has upon physical activity intervention outcomes. Therefore the purpose of this study is to consider the effect the different measures of socioeconomic status, specifically income, occupational status, education and area deprivation, have upon the effectiveness of an established implementation intentions-based intervention (the volitional helpsheet) designed to increase physical activity.

Study Details

Timeline

Interventions