image: Courtney Monroe is an assistant professor of health promotion, education, and behavior.
Credit: Grant Jackson
Courtney Monroe, an assistant professor in the Arnold School’s Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior has been awarded $3M from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. She will use the five-year R01 grant to attempt to achieve long-term increases in physical activity among U.S. adults by harnessing technology and social support.
Researchers and clinicians – as well as most Americans – are familiar with the health benefits derived from physical activity. So how do we increase physical activity among the 50 percent of U.S. adults who are insufficiently active?
“Many interventions have been successful in achieving short-term increases in physical activity among adults, but we’re examining a longer-term, scalable solution to maintaining these improvements,” Monroe says. “Although considerable evidence from prior studies points to the role social support plays in facilitating physical activity initiation and maintenance, effective methods of tapping into existing social relationships – an increasingly recognized potent contributor to health outcomes – to promote sustained support for physical activity are less well known.”
With this study, she will design and implement a digital intervention that aims to effectively harness existing social ties to achieve long-term behavior changes related to physical activity. A faculty member with the South Carolina SmartState Technology Center to Promote Healthy Lifestyles (TecHealth), Monroe will use her expertise in technology, exercise, and behavioral science to encourage and measure physical activity.
Three hundred insufficiently physically active adults from diverse backgrounds across the U.S. will self-select into teams of three to eight individuals with preexisting social ties. Approximately 60 teams will be randomized to receive either a three-month theory-based, technology-delivered (e.g., mobile apps, Fitbit activity trackers) physical activity intervention or this same intervention plus digitally delivered social support training.
Teams randomized to receive digitally delivered social support training will participate in interactive online modules highlighting the best methods for providing and requesting social support for becoming more physically active. These teams will also have access to additional digital tools that allow for interaction with the research team/staff and peers in ways designed to reinforce the knowledge and skills learned during the social support training.
“Our goal is to provide rigorous evidence on a novel and promising approach for leveraging existing social relationships to enhance physical activity among insufficiently active adults,” Monroe says. “By using technology that can easily deliver the intervention on a much larger scale, this approach has the potential to improve metabolic and cardiovascular health at the population level.”