Inspiring Patients with Overweight and Obesity to Participate in a Walking Program: A Comprehensive Formative Research Study

Abstract

Understanding the target audience and targeted behaviour through comprehensive formative research is essential for designing an effective behaviour change intervention. Formative research is an essential benchmark criterion of Social Marketing framework (Andreasen, 2002). This thesis responds to calls for broader formative research approaches to be undertaken (Rundle-Thiele, Russell-Bennett, Leo, & Dietrich, 2013) employing a narrative literature review, a qualitative inquiry and finally a quantitative study in the form of an online survey to generate consumer insights that could be used in intervention planning and design. In social marketing, small scale qualitative research designs dominate formative research practice. While these can capture others’ perspectives they are limited by their subjectivity. The addition of a narrative literature review employing systematic search procedures and a quantitative study ensured that an objective stance was employed to inform the planning and design of social marketing walking behaviour change intervention. In study one, the literature review, a total of twenty-five walking behaviour change interventions were identified using systematic search procedures. In study two, fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with overweight and obese adults who were living in the Brisbane and Logan city council area of Queensland, Australia to explore audience perspectives about the benefits and barriers associated with walking and to explore means that could be used to motivate them to walk regularly. In study three, an online cross sectional survey was conducted to investigate walking prevalence for overweight and obese people and to empirically examine factors known to be associated with physical activity.