Groundbreaking research on attitudes to physical activity

• Posted on Jan 30, 2017

Sport England is preparing to publish a “groundbreaking” piece of research that logs people’s attitudes and motivations to sport and physical activity.

The data will form part of the quango’s Active Lives Survey, which replaced the Active People Survey as its method to measure the activity of the nation.

Earlier this week, Sport England released figures from its first Active Lives Survey, with headline details about the rates of physical activity, the popularity of certain physical activities and demographic data.

While the report had more robust findings than the Active People Survey – which solely looked at sports participation figures – Sport England director of insight Lisa O’Keefe told Sports Management that there was more to come with deeper qualitative data.

“I think we have done some groundbreaking work here that I think is going to open people’s eyes and move us on from what was clunky data in Active People about latent demand,” said O’Keefe.

“[In Active People] we’d just ask people, ‘what are you doing, and would you like to do more?’ It was a clunky way of doing it and this is a much more sophisticated approach.”

Using academic literature as a guide, Sport England has designed the survey to ask subtle questions that can “help understand where somebody’s head’s at”, rather than just outright questions concerning levels of activity.

“We’ve looked at all the literature out there about how you can understand people’s motivations, because ultimately that’s what you’re trying to get to the bottom of,” she said.

“Have they got no motivation, have the got some sort of external motivator? We’re also looking for an internal motivation as well.”

O’Keefe said the data would be released in six months time following a year’s collection period.

Source: Leisure Opportunities