Social Support on Fitness Behavior in an Online Fitness Community

Physical activity is known to provide important and wide-ranging physical and mental health benefits. However, a large proportion of the world population fails to achieve recommended levels of physical activity. With the development of pervasive technology such as smartphones and wearable devices, increasing attention has been paid to promoting positive fitness behaviors through self-tracking and participation in online fitness communities. Online fitness communities offer users the ability to log and share activity-related data, providing opportunities to observe, analyze, and reflect on performance and goals. Online fitness communities can also serve as a social network that connects users, promoting social interaction features as a means towards behavioral change and healthy life-style promotion. However, limited work has comprehensively investigated these networks; their structural features and association with behavior (and behavior change) may reveal important dimensions of social exercise and its impacts on participants. Online fitness communities capture information on physical activities as well as peer-to-peer interactions at larger scale and lower cost. Such behavioral trace data allow researchers to observe how individuals really engage in physical activity and social interaction, rather than how they report on their participation. Utilizing a large-scale behavioral trace dataset collected from an online fitness community using novel sampling methods, this dissertation aims advance our understanding of online social interaction in a fitness community, as well as how it is associated with fitness behaviors. This work will provide new insights into pathways for health promotion and the possibility for network-based health interventions.

Supervisory Committee:

Committee Chair: Emma Spiro, Associate Professor, Information School
GSR: Gary Hsieh, Associate Professor, HCDE
Member: Zack Almquist, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Member: Nicholas Weber, Assistant Professor, Information School